Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential vote in the District of Columbia 93% to 5.4%. The Republican Party went extinct in D.C. shortly after the dinosaurs died out.
The D.C. City Council is one of the most radical local governments in the United States. It passed an 1,100-page "criminal justice reform" measure so radical that even Democrats in Congress suggested it be amended.
So, it's a safe bet that if you chose a jury from a pool of Washington, D.C. citizens, nine out of ten would have a liberal slant to their politics.
No worries, said an appeals court. Citizens of the District are perfectly capable of setting aside their rabid ideology and judging a case fairly, even if the defendant is a former cop who took part in the January 6 riot.
“The political inclinations of a populace writ large say nothing about an individual’s ability to serve impartially in adjudicating the criminal conduct of an individual,” Barack Obama appointee Patricia Millett wrote in a decision joined by Trump appointees Greg Katsas and Neomi Rao.
Indeed, you can't guess someone's politics just because 90% of the people in a given area are left-wing loons. Each potential juror when questioned will be asked, "Can you remain impartial in this case?"
"Oh, sure. No problem," they'll reply. According to the appeals court judges, that's that. You can't assume the jurors are lying because they've been sworn in.
It's a gigantic game of pretend. The court pretends that the jurors are impartial, and the jurors pretend that they told the truth about not being biased.
The appeals court case involved lawyers for former New York City police officer Thomas Webster arguing that Washington jurors were too biased to hear cases related to the riot.
The ruling is a ringing rejection of Trump and his allies’ longstanding claims that fair trials are impossible in cities with Democratic-leaning populations. Trump himself is, of course, currently on trial in deep-blue Manhattan, where he was held in contempt for violating a gag order after he claimed that his jury there is “95 percent Democrats.”
Tuesday’s decision from the D.C. Circuit is also an endorsement of courtroom processes intended to screen potential jurors for bias before trials begin. And it could give a boost to the stalled effort to try Trump on charges that he attempted to subvert the 2020 election and helped foment the riot that Webster joined.
Ordinarily, those "courtroom processes" work fine when the jury pool is drawn from a typical American metropolitan area. Then you can find plenty of unbiased potential jurors to sit on even a controversial trial.
But 93% Democratic in D.C.? That's asking too much from human beings who are exposed to liberal indoctrination from the time they enter school. "Courtroom processes" cannot ferret out those who lie or those who actually want to sit on the jury.
Many of the more than 150 Jan. 6 defendants who have gone to trial have argued for a change of venue on the basis of political bias of the jury pool or lingering anger over the events of Jan. 6. However, federal judges in Washington have uniformly rejected those challenges, responding that the process for questioning potential jurors was sufficient to weed out potential bias.
In the wake of his indictment last August on charges he led a conspiracy aimed at overturning the 2020 presidential election, Trump repeatedly echoed the claims that a Washington jury would be hopelessly unfair to him because the city voted 92 percent for Biden and only 5 percent for him in that contest. (Judges have repeatedly noted that this statistic omits the 30 percent of D.C. residents who did not vote but would be included in the jury pool).
The idea that the 30% who didn't vote for either candidate wouldn't be hopelessly biased against a Republican is absurd. When everyone you know — friends, neighbors, people you worship with, people you play with, and even casual acquaintances — all think one way and vote one way, no one can expect an unbiased jury in Washington, D.C.
