Wharton undergraduate Irina Malinovskaya faces her second trial for first-degree murder starting on Thursday.
Jury selection in the case begins today in Wilmington, Del.
Malinovskaya has been in since her arrest in late 2004. Her first trial ended in February with a hung jury that favored acquittal 11 to 1.
She is charged with murdering Temple graduate student Irina Zlotnikov on Dec. 23, 2004, in the New Castle, Del., apartment of Robert Bondar, Zlotnikov's boyfriend at the time.
Malinovskaya had previously been in a relationship with Bondar.
Her lawyer, Eugene Maurer, would not return repeated calls for comment.
According to the Delaware Attorney General's Office, state prosecutors won't comment on the case prior to the trial.
Although law experts say it is impossible to determine the outcome of the trial, many seem to agree that the prosecution faces a difficult task.
"I do think that an 11-1 vote for acquittal is a strong sign of a very weak prosecution case," said Penn Law professor David Rudovsky.
Paul Robinson, also of Penn Law, added that the decision to retry may reflect the prosecution's acknowledgment of this weakness.
"The prosecution must have thought that they didn't do so good of a job the first time and decided to try again," said Robinson.
Still, it's less common for state prosecutors to proceed with a retrial when a hung jury clearly favored one of the parties, Robinson said.
"In general principle, it is not unusual to have retrials after mistrials," Robinson said. "But if there is a lopsided vote, it is also not unusual to reach a plea agreement."
Robinson also said that sometimes the decision to hold a retrial stems from the inability of the defense and the prosecution to agree on a plea.
After the trial, "each side makes a calculation on what their cases were, sometimes they can agree on a deal and sometimes they can't," he said.
