Jury selection for a 2001 Mandeville murder is expected to end late Thursday or early Friday after a lengthy effort to find jurors not prejudiced by media coverage of the high profile case.

Dominic Robinson could face the death penalty if found guilty of killing Samantha Jaume, 25, in the Woodridge Subdivision off Louisiana Highway 22 on July 4, 2001, during a botched robbery attempt.

District Court Judge Elaine Dimiceli, who issued a gag order for everyone involved in the case, subpoened about 500 jurors, a “fairly large” juror pool for capital cases, a clerk said. By trial time prosecutors Scott Gardner and Bruce Dearing and defense attorneys Dwight Doskey and Maurice Tyler are expected to whittle the pool down to 12, plus two alternative jurors.

Earlier this week, several pools of about 75 jurors entered the courtroom, and one-by-one were interviewed alone by prosecutors and Robinson’s defense team in Dimiceli’s chambers, a court official confirmed.

Before they can be seated, each potential juror must be considered “death qualified,” meaning they can objectively weigh a death sentence or life imprisonment for anyone convicted.

In order to sentence someone to death, all 12 jurors must be unanimous on both the guilty verdict and during a separate penalty phase argued after the verdict is reached.

Jurors must also be willing to impose a lesser punishment such as manslaughter, second-degree murder and not guilty if the prosecution does not prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt.

Jaume’s murder in 2001 stunned the Mandeville community and St. Tammany Parish and months later was the subject of an “America’s Most Wanted” episode, where new details of the crime were revealed.

But it took more than two years for investigators to solve the case, and when they did four people were arrested, including Robinson, who was already serving time in Angola.

Investigators allege Robinson and a cohort, Jason Gainey, followed Jaume and her four children, then ages 2, 4, 7 and 9, home from a shopping trip to Wal-Mart in Covington. When they arrived home, Robinson approached Jaume and demanded the keys to her new 2001 Ford Expedition. As he forced Jaume back up the stairway of the family’s elevated home to retrieve the keys, her 7-year-old son alerted his two oldest sisters and called 911.

A SWAT team and local authorities arrived and were able to get the children out of the home.

When they entered the home an intruder was not inside, but Jaume was found shot. She later died at Lakeview Regional Medical Center.

Gainey, who was driving and allegedly fled the scene when he heard a gunshot, is also facing first-degree murder charges in an upcoming trial. Robinson, meanwhile, is serving a life sentence in Angola for carjacking and hurting a Houma woman less than two months after Jaume’s murder.

If convicted and sentenced to death, Robinson will be the first defendant sent to death row from St. Tammany Parish since 2005, when Jesse Montejo was convicted of killing Corporate Cleaner’s owner Louis Ferrari, 61, during a home invasion on Sept. 5, 2002.