When a judge decided last week to move Scott Peterson's trial out of Modesto, Calif., he singled out as particularly persuasive an independent poll by a local college professor showing the overwhelming majority of the community believed the accused murderer guilty.

Superior Court Judge Al Girolami said the telephone survey, which gauged public opinion across the state on the case, was not only "the most thorough" submitted, but also clearly indicated that jurors in other parts of California were more apt to keep an open mind.

But hours after the ruling, six of the professor's students confessed they had fabricated the raw data because they were either too busy studying for finals or to poor to afford the toll calls, according to a local report.

"We falsified the info," one student told the Modesto Bee. "The stuff we submitted wasn't true."

Just what the impact of these revelations will be is unclear. The judge is scheduled to meet with lawyers Jan. 20 to choose another venue for the trial, and he could change some or all of his ruling at that time.

Prosecutors bitterly opposed moving the trial out of Modesto and immediately urged the students, who spoke to the newspaper anonymously, to contact the district attorney's office.

Chief Deputy District Attorney John Goold would not say whether they have interviewed any students, nor whether they plan to ask Judge Girolami to rethink his decision, but he acknowledged the office was intrigued by the reports.

"We're working on it," Goold said.

In the controversial study, California State Stanislaus criminal justice professor Stephen Schoenthaler assigned 65 students to act as polltakers. The work, which accounted for a fifth of their grade, consisted of calling numbers at random from phone books in different California counties and asking a series of preset questions about the Peterson case.

The students submitted the answers to Schoenthaler, who analyzed the results. All told, 1,175 people were to be surveyed.

The study Schoenthaler submitted to the court suggested that 70 percent of Stanislaus County's residents had formed an opinion of Peterson's guilt. In comparison, only 47 percent of Los Angeles residents and 51.8 percent of Santa Clara county residents had a similar opinion.

But some of the students who participated said they invented the results because the process was too expensive and time-consuming.

Although prosecutor Dave Harris did not find out about the students' claims until after the judge's decision, he raised concerns about Schoenthaler's methodology during a hearing last Thursday.

"Is it possible that college students went home and never made these calls and just made these numbers up?" Harris asked, noting that the results showed much higher degrees of bias than studies commissioned at the same time by the defense and prosecution.

Even the defense's expert found only 39 percent of Stanislaus residents believed Peterson guilty.

Girolami did not base his decision on Schoenthaler's poll alone. He also said he thought Modestans, thousands of whom volunteered to search for Laci Peterson, attended candlelight vigils and later a memorial service, might be too emotionally involved in the case and predisposed to "view the victim as their own."

But the judge referred obliquely to the study when deciding where the trial should be held. He approved three Bay Area counties — San Mateo, Santa Clara and Alameda — while ruling out the inland counties from Fresno to Sacramento because Schoenthaler's survey indicated people in those counties shared the bias of Stanislaus residents.

Sacramento was one of the counties prosecutors preferred.

Schoenthaler did not return a call seeking comment Monday. The university is conducting its own probe of his work.

"We will conduct an extensive review to compile the information necessary to determine exactly what happened and the appropriate course of action," said university president Marvalene Hughes. "Scientific misconduct and academic dishonesty are serious breaches of professional ethics and research standards that are not tolerated at this university."

Peterson, 31, faces the death penalty if convicted of killing his pregnant wife and unborn child.