C/D: Using a defendant's religious beliefs and jury's ignorance about said religion against him in court

Putting Islam on the Stand
How far can prosecutors go in using religion to make their case?

Vanessa Blum
Legal Times
07-08-2005

In a recent criminal trial in Virginia, the prosecutor told the jury that the defendant couldn't be trusted to tell the truth, that he would lie to their faces -- all because of his religious beliefs.

The defendant, an American citizen accused of supporting terrorism, was convicted. The religion in question, of course, was Islam.

Now, the Virginia attorney representing Ali Al-Timimi is pushing for a new trial, saying that prosecutors secured the guilty verdict by appealing to religious bigotry against Muslims...

[...]

Timimi's lawyer, Edward MacMahon Jr., is seeking to overturn Timimi's conviction, citing prosecutorial misconduct and the prejudicial impact of statements he says portrayed Islam as a violent religion. One specific objection: that Assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Kromberg instructed the jury in his closing argument that Timimi, a devout Muslim, would lie to jurors because the jurors were "kafir" -- or nonbelievers...

[...]

Essentially, many jurors' first experience learning about Islam would be from the prosecutor," says Detroit civil rights lawyer Shereef Akeel. "They don't have any reference points to assess the prosecutor's credibility."

Akeel, who sat in the courtroom during the 2003 terrorism trial of four Detroit-area residents, says he was disturbed by prosecutors' frequent use of the phrase "economic jihad."

"Rather than focusing on the elements of a crime, they cloud it by sprinkling the facts with these foreign terms that seem frightening to a person not familiar with the religion," Akeel says.

To prevent religious bias from affecting jury deliberations, jury selection in terrorism trials is particularly rigorous. Not only must prospective jurors answer scores of questions about their feelings toward Islam and the Middle East, they also are asked to state their own religion -- a question that is ordinarily considered irrelevant...