"Given that there's going to be inflammatory testimony about Jews and Zionism, I think it would be hard for Jews to cast aside any innate antipathy," said Cohn, who is Jewish.
"The American Jewish community is heavily aligned with Israel and Zionism. Here is a guy who is a Muslim, who is opposed to those things."
The subject of the controversial ban first arose at a recent court hearing.
"Your Honor . . . as you know, I'm not wild about having Jews on the jury in this case," Cohn told Brooklyn federal Judge Eric Vitaliano in February.
Federal prosecutors William Sarratt and James Loonam reacted with alarm.
"I don't think Judge [Robert] Levy will be ready to violate the Constitution and exclude people from the jury on the basis of their religious beliefs," Sarratt told the judge.
Monday, March 11, 2013
Terrorist Defense Attorney Tries to Exclude Jews from Jury
I'm outraged by this but I have to say I find it somewhat ironic/funny that a guy named Cohn tries to convince a judge that having Jews on the jury (a jury selected by a judge named Levy) would be unfair because Jews couldn't be impartial in a terror case:
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People are excluded from juries based on religious, political, or other philosophical beliefs regularly. This is normal.
ReplyDeleteI think the bigger racism is your title, "Terrorist defense attorney"... Do you know he is guilty? You see, this is what is particularly wicked. The neocons push the war on terror under the guise that basically scary brown men are here to murder you and regularly use the term "terrorist" for anyone simply accused, not convicted. Going along with this is how you get the NDAA, acquiescene to torture and permanent detention, which won't mostly affect Muslims.
Do you understand that almost every headline of Muslims arrested in a "terrorist plot" has led to no conviction, even usually no full trial? Routinely these cases are chucked out by judges because the FBI sends provocateurs into Muslim communities and finds fully- or borderline-mentally retarded people, then suggests to them that they should participate in some sort of violent plan, then sometimes facilitates the materials to carry out an attack. They then arrest the people they set up and entrapped, people who often might not like America and certainly not Israel, but do not have the mental capacity to plot and execute an attack.
There are really almost no convictions, but they get their front-page headlines which keeps the illusion of the 'terrorist threat' in the news to scare the average older people who still read print newspapers and watch 24-7 'news channels'.
Look at the WTC bombing in '93. They tried to burn one of their informants in the subsequent trials, but he had taped a conversation with his FBI handler where the latter said to replace a fake bomb with a real bomb!
If you go along with this, America and whatever libertarian elements of it you want to believe in are finished!
Do you have any statistics to defend your claims of most of the arrested Muslims being found not-guilty subsequently? Also it is unconstitutional to keep people of a certain religion off a jury. At the initial trial of two black men accused of civil-rights violations stemming from the Crown Heights killing in 1991 of Hasidic scholar Yankel Rosenbaum, a judge tried to balance the religious and racial composition of the jury, but an appellate court overturned the verdict.
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