Here’s an odd story, via the Huffington Post. Frederick Cohn, the attorney for Abdel Hameed Shehadeh, who faces terrorism charges, requested that Jews be excluded from the jury:
“Your Honor…as you know, I’m not wild about having Jews on the jury in this case,” Cohn told a judge in February. “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. 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.
It’s then reported that:
Prosecutors argued that it would be unconstitutional to bar someone from serving on a jury due to their religion.
This seems an odd point, as there is no implication that Cohn was seeking to exclude only religious Jews from the jury. As the author of this piece observes:
Cohn’s effort highlights an increasing tendency, in an effort to achieve “fairness” towards accused terrorists, of marching along a road littered with the civil rights of others.
The first commenter under the HuffPo piece asks precisely the question which was in my mind:
Why does the lawyer think that only Jewish people will be offended by the defendant’s beliefs?
