The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit heard arguments Tuesday on whether D.C. jurors are unfairly biased against people charged with committing crimes at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. It\u2019s a question with relevance for former president Donald Trump, who plans to try to get his trial moved out of D.C. where he faces federal charges of trying to subvert the 2020 election.<\/p>\n
The appeal comes from Thomas Webster, a veteran of the New York Police Department who tackled a D.C. officer on the grounds outside the Capitol. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Webster was convicted of assaulting a police officer in 2022. He has argued for a new trial, saying D.C. jurors were biased against him through media coverage, their own experience of Jan. 6 and their political leanings.<\/p>\n
The three judges focused narrowly on whether trial judge Amit P. Mehta properly let three people onto the jury. One said before trial that he \u201cwasn\u2019t a fan of Trump,\u201d whose supporters are \u201cnot fun to be around when they\u2019re being wild around the streets.\u201d Another said she felt unsafe during the Trump presidency as a Black woman. \u201cI don\u2019t have a high opinion of former President Donald Trump, and by extension, I don\u2019t think his supporters are particularly smart for supporting him,\u201d the third said.<\/p>\n
The Justice Department emphasized that each of those jurors had also said they would acquit Webster if the government did not demonstrate his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Defense attorney Elizabeth Brandenburg said that was \u201ca very problematic question\u201d because \u201ca biased juror\u201d would be more likely to believe the government had met that standard.<\/p>\n
Judge Patricia A. Millett, an Obama appointee, said it was \u201cvery, very worrisome\u201d that a potential juror who agreed that Trump supporters have a \u201cslight disadvantage\u201d with her was not taken out of the pool. But that person was not on the actual jury.<\/p>\n
The D.C. Circuit last considered juror bias in 1976, rejecting 5 to 1 an attempt by three of President Richard M. Nixon\u2019s aides to undo their convictions for involvement in the Watergate scandal. \u201cExcept in the most extreme cases,\u201d the court says, a trial judge\u2019s \u201csubjective reaction\u201d to whether jurors can be impartial should be respected.<\/p>\n
The Nixon staffers had protested that Watergate coverage led D.C. residents \u201cto feel that they were patriots repelling an attack on their country by an enemy within the gates.\u201d Webster likewise said of Jan. 6 that \u201cthe media and Government characterized the events as an assault on our democracy stoked by the outgoing president, which makes every citizen a victim.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a poll of D.C. residents conducted by the federal public defender\u2019s office cited by Webster, 71 percent said that from what they had heard, those arrested for involvement in the Capitol riot were guilty of the charges brought against them. Only 54 percent of a comparison group from Atlanta said the same. But roughly half of both groups \u2014 52 percent of D.C. residents and 45 percent of Atlantans \u2014 said that they would likely find an individual Jan. 6 defendant guilty if sitting on that person\u2019s jury.<\/p>\n
Mehta said before Webster\u2019s trial that the polling showed that despite broadly unfavorable views many D.C. residents would be able to keep an open mind at trial. \u201cThe appropriate way to identify a biased juror pool is through voir dire,\u201d he ruled, a reference to questioning potential jurors undergo before trial.<\/p>\n
The Nixon aides also did a poll showing that before the trial started, 61 percent of D.C. residents thought the defendants were guilty. The D.C. Circuit dismissed those results for similar reasons to Mehta, saying \u201ca poll taken in private by private pollsters and paid for by one side\u201d is not worth as much as public questioning by a judge through \u201cprocedures, practices and principles developed by the common law since the reign of Henry II.\u201d<\/p>\n
The government has an argument in Webster it cannot make in Trump\u2019s case \u2014 that potential jurors know about Jan. 6 generally but not the defendant specifically. Only one person in Webster\u2019s jury pool had heard of him, according to the court record.<\/p>\n
Trump has not filed a motion to move his D.C. trial, which is on hold while he argues he is immune from prosecution. But he has repeatedly said he cannot get a fair trial in the city when he is \u201ccalling for a federal takeover of this filthy and crime ridden embarrassment to our nation.\u201d Special counsel Jack Smith said that the way to handle Trump\u2019s \u201cdisparaging and inflammatory attacks on the citizens of this District\u201d was for Judge Tanya S. Chutkan to bar him from making them. But the gag order imposed on Trump allows him to insult D.C. residents. One appellate judge said it was \u201chard to see how\u201d any ruling would \u201csucceed in preventing a trial in the court of public opinion\u201d for Trump.<\/p>\n
The U.S. Supreme Court, which is already considering upending the government\u2019s use of the lead felony charge used in Jan. 6 cases, could also hear Webster\u2019s appeal. The Court has not overturned a guilty verdict because of media coverage since the 1960s. Two rulings in favor of defendants claiming bias from pretrial reporting involved confessions made public in the press. In a third, the trial began two weeks before an election involving both the lead prosecutor and the judge; journalists were given so much leeway in the courtroom that the defendant couldn\u2019t speak privately to his lawyers.<\/p>\n
Webster is also arguing that he should have been able to question the integrity of the officer he was accused of assaulting by invoking an incident from June 2021. The officer, Noah Rathbun, killed a man described as armed with a rifle and holding a woman against her will. He was cleared of any wrongdoing by the Justice Department in December; Webster went on trial the following spring.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit heard arguments Tuesday on whether D.C. jurors are unfairly biased against people charged with committing crimes at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. It\u2019s a question with relevance for former president Donald Trump, who plans to try to get his trial moved out of D.C. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":695,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-694","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/694","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=694"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/694\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/695"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}