MOULTRIE, Ga. — The judge overseeing a Colquitt County death penalty case indicated that a trial date could be set soon.

During a Monday morning hearing, attorneys for the suspect in the 2016 quintuple murder filed paperwork questioning portions of a police interrogation.

Attorneys for Jeffrey Alan Peacock, 27, who is charged with arson and five murder counts, had argued during an October hearing that an investigator tricked Peacock. The defense presented the motion Monday to exclude portions of statements Peacock made to police.

During the Monday status hearing Superior Court Judge James E. Hardy set a hearing for Feb. 19 at which defense attorneys indicated they expect to be prepared to wrap up all pre-trial matters. At that time the defense is expected to make requests concerning jury composition and a possible move of the case to another community in the state.

Hardy indicated that he hopes “to get a trial date set” in February.

Peacock is accused of the fatal shooting of the five residents of 505 Rossman Dairy Road on May 15, 2016, and setting fire to the house in which they were living. He is being represented by the Georgia Capital Defender’s Office.

In the motion filed Monday the defense argued specifically that an investigator tried to trick Peacock using “pop psychology” about seven hours into an interview held at the Colquitt County Sheriff’s Office prior to Peacock’s arrest.

Attorneys pointed to a portion of the interview in which a Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent suggested that Peacock may not remember what happened at the residence because of “bad dope” that may caused him to do “something you don’t want to think about.”

Later, the defense motion said, the investigator asked Peacock to “imagine himself killing all of the deceased people” and to “imagine scenarios and treat them as if they were memories.”

In a report prepared for the defense, Dr. Gregory DeClue, a licensed clinical psychologist who has worked with police in teaching and evaluating interrogation techniques, referred to the request to imagine scenarios as “flawed.”

The investigator “deliberately employed flawed interrogation techniques that are widely recognized as being extremely dangerous, in that they can lead to contaminated memories, false confessions, and wrongful convictions,” DeClue wrote in his report. “This is not a scientifically valid method for obtaining reliable information, and these interview/interrogation techniques are not generally accepted by psychologists or by police-interrogation trainers.”

The defense has asked for a hearing on the motion and for the judge to exclude portions of Peacock’s recorded statements that are described in it.

Peacock has been indicted on murder charges in the deaths of Jonathan Garrett Edwards, Ramsey Jones Pidcock and Aaron Reid Williams, all 21, 20-year-old Alicia Brooke Norman; and Jordan Shane Croft, 22, and has pleaded not guilty to those and an arson charge.

Hardy previously has ruled that evidence found in Peacock’s truck, seized at the scene of the fire, can be used in court.