Dc’s Liberal Bent Does Not Amount To Inherent Bias Against Jan. 6 Defendants, Appeals Court Rules

Washington, D.C.’s left-leaning politics has no bearing on its residents’ ability to be fair jurors in trials of those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.

Two former President Donald Trump appointees from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals joined an appointee of former President Barack Obama in a unanimous three-judge ruling that turned down arguments from lawyers for former New York City Police Officer Thomas Webster that Washington jurors were too biased to sit on cases related to the 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,” Obama appointee Patricia Millett wrote in a decision joined by Trump appointees Greg Katsas and Neomi Rao.

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.

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).

“No way I can get a fair trial, or even close to a fair trial, in Washington, D.C.,” Trump wrote on his social media site shortly after he was charged last summer. “There are many reasons for this, but just one is that I am calling for a federal takeover of this filthy and crime ridden embarrassment to our nation.”

Trump’s attorneys have not yet filed a motion for change of venue in the election-focused federal case, which has been on hold since December while Trump pressed an appeal claiming that the prosecution intruded on immunity he’s entitled to related to actions he took while president. That issue was argued at the Supreme Court last month and is expected to be decided by the justices by the end of June.

The new appeals court ruling seems to give the trial judge overseeing Trump’s case, Tanya Chutkan, broad latitude to reject a change of venue motion if Trump’s lawyers file one and to instead rely on close questioning of jurors as the means of ensuring they can be fair.

The decision issued Tuesday stems from the case of Webster, a former NYPD officer who was convicted of brutally assaulting a D.C. cop who was defending the Capitol that day. Webster was convicted by a jury in 2022 and sentenced later that year to 10 years in prison by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, an Obama appointee.

Webster appealed the ruling on several grounds, primarily focusing on what he claimed was an unfair jury selection process. He argued that jurors had been exposed to negative media coverage about Jan. 6 and most had expressed disapproval of what occurred at the Capitol that day.

But the judges, citing Supreme Court precedent, said those arguments did little to show bias in Webster’s case.

“We expect jurors to view significant criminal events in their hometown with an unapproving eye, whether it is the January 6th attack on the Capitol, a murder, or an armed robbery spree,” Millett wrote. “Generalized disapproval of criminal conduct — even the specific conduct at issue in a defendant’s case — says nothing about a juror’s ability to be impartial in deciding whether a particular individual committed a crime or not.”

The judges concluded that even jurors who were critical of Trump during the selection process were not evidence of unfair prejudice to the defendant.

“Nothing in those jurors’ statements suggests that they had prejudged Webster’s guilt or were incapable of deciding the case objectively based on the evidence,” Millett added.