Trial in football player slaying moved

Thirteen years after University of Kentucky football player Trent DiGiuro was killed by a sniper, his accused murderer has won a change of venue.

The Lexington Herald-Leader is reporting that a Fayette Circuit Judge ruled May 8 that Shane Ragland's murder trial had received too much publicity in Lexington, where DiGiuro was killed. Ragland's trial will be moved to Louisville.

DiGiuro was shot and killed on his twenty-first birthday, July 17, 1994, as he celebrated on the front porch of a house he had rented on Woodland Avenue, near the UK campus. Ragland, a fellow student, was convicted of the murder in 2002 and sentenced to 30 years in prison, but his conviction was later overturned.

Ragland has maintained his innocence, and has his own web site presenting his side of the story and offering a $25,000 reward for information leading to "the arrest and conviction of the actual killer of Trent DiGiuro (not Shane Ragland)."