An appeals court in Washington, D.C., has unanimously rejected arguments of juror bias advanced by Thomas Webster, a former U.S. Marine and NYPD officer who violently assaulted a cop at the Capitol on Jan. 6 — including by trying to gouge the officer’s eyes out and swinging a metal flagpole at police as he screamed things like “you f—— piece of s—” and “you f—— commie f—.”
Webster claimed he acted in self-defense, as Law&Crime previously reported, but those claims were summarily shot down.
The ruling Tuesday from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals is a huge blow to other Jan. 6 defendants including former President Donald Trump who has claimed Jan. 6 cases could not be tried in the nation’s capital because the district’s residents are inherently biased.
The three-judge ruling was handed down by Circuit Judge Patricia Millett, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, and Circuit Judges Neomi Rao and Greg Katsas. Both Katsas and Rao were appointed to the bench by former President Donald Trump.
Webster raised no fewer than three challenges to his conviction. He argued the jury was biased, that he was denied his right to cross-examine the officer he attacked and that jury instructions were lacking. But, as the court wrote Tuesday, “each of those objections fails.”
“Prejudice across an entire jury pool can be presumed ‘only [in] the extreme case,” the panel wrote, adding that the U.S. Supreme Court has already set a “very high bar” on so-called “presumptive prejudice.”
Webster, the panel said, did not clear that bar.
There was “nothing in the record” to suggest his jury pool was tainted nor whether he was guilty or innocent or even knew who he was. The record lacked any pervasive evidence of prejudice and, in fact, there was little media coverage of his case, anyway.
Though Webster pointed to two news articles and over a million Google searches that brought up his name, there was no “‘vivid, unforgettable information’ of the ‘smoking-gun variety’ necessary to trigger presumptive prejudice concerns in any of those examples,” the court wrote.
Instead, his citations provided “straightforward, unemotional factual accounts of events,” the progress of official investigations, his surrender and his bond hearing.
Prosecutors did call him a “junkyard dog” — and that was reported — but the articles themselves did not endorse that label.
The Google searches also lacked anything specifically prejudicial and, even so, Webster failed to offer any evidence showing how the Google searches were engaged with by the jurors.
Webster tried to rely on a poll of 400 people registered to vote in D.C. who expressed “negative impressions” of people arrested for crimes tied to Jan. 6, but that too “misses the point,” the court said.
“We expect jurors to view significant criminal events in their hometown with an unapproving eye, whether it is the January 6 attack on the Capitol, a murder or an armed robbery spree,” the judges wrote.
Generalized disapproval does not mean a juror is unable to be impartial and the Constitution only forbids a juror from holding an entrenched view about an individual’s guilt or innocence.
Claims that there was too small a population to be fair were also dismissed: There are more than 600,000 people in the District of Columbia — only 12 are required for a jury, the court reminded Webster.
It “may be” that the region overwhelming voted for now President Joe Biden, the judges ceded, but Webster’s assertion that the city’s political inclinations writ large preclude impartial juries is unfounded.
“Indeed, we have held that District juries could impartially adjudicate other criminal cases arising out of political matters, including Watergate,” the ruling states.
Also worth noting is that the most severe charges to emerge from the attack on the U.S. Capitol were charges of seditious conspiracy. Several Oath Keepers and Proud Boys charged with that offense were acquitted by D.C. jurors.
As for jury selection, Webster’s search was “exacting” with a screening of 21 potential jurors that both prosecutors and defense attorneys agreed upon. Those jurors were asked about their relationship to the case, the parties, attorneys, witnesses and even court staff.
Jurors were asked about their knowledge of the attack on the Capitol, Webster’s role in it or their feelings about Trump or Jan. 6 in general. They were asked questions about their feelings toward Trump’s supporters as well as their opinion on police broadly speaking. They were asked to follow the same instructions any juror is asked to follow too: avoid media, respect the court’s rules, presume the defendant’s innocence first, and disclose any hardships that would stop them from serving.
All of Webster’s jurors were questioned one by one and under oath.
While he argued the search was “truncated,” the court disagreed, noting his full day of voir dire was “on par with what has passed constitutional muster in other cases” and that Webster never provided any reasoning on appeal behind what he thought the questions should have been.
Three seated jurors who expressed a negative opinion of Trump during selection did not say anything so prejudicial that their ouster was warranted either, the appeals court noted.
When defense attorneys asked one of those jurors if their client would be at a “disadvantage” by having them in the pool, the person said “no,” and Webster’s attorney replied, “okay” before moving on.
Another juror who said she felt unsafe during the Trump presidency was also allowed to stay on without any objection by Webster’s lawyer.
There were just two juror objections that were raised and then denied by the court as insufficient.
Pointing to either one of them, the appeals panel noted it “does not help Webster’s case for the simple reason that neither one sat on his jury” anyway, the ruling states.
The appellate court was, however, willing to acknowledge that at least one potential juror should have been struck for cause after the juror said that he did not view the trial as a “zero-zero game to start” and when asked if he could be impartial, he candidly replied: “I really, I honestly don’t think so.”
“A district court should never allow a juror to sit after he admits he cannot presume the defendant innocent. Full stop. Still, that single error in a lengthy voir dire process does not indict the process itself given the absence of any prejudice tied to the jurors who actually decided Webster’s case,” the court wrote.
As for claims that he was denied the right to cross-examine Metropolitan Police Department Officer Noah Rathbun, the officer Webster was convicted of assaulting, the appeals court explained that prosecutors had moved to bar Webster from cross-examining Rathbun about extreme force used during an alleged kidnapping in the district, an unrelated case that was under administrative investigation at the time.
At a pretrial conference, a judge agreed Rathbun’s probe was “certainly fair game” but days later, the point was moot. The police department announced Rathbun’s use of force was justified and prosecutors moved to bar his testimony since that investigation was officially closed.
Transcripts showed Webster’s lawyer saying he “certainly [would] like to delve into” Rathbun’s probe, but agreed that he couldn’t ask about the investigation anymore.
“No one brought up the issue again, and Webster’s counsel chose not to ask Officer Rathbun about any use-of-force investigation at trial,” the appeals court wrote, adding:
The court never stopped Webster from pursuing investigation-related questions when Officer Rathbun testified. Instead, Webster’s counsel sua sponte stopped himself. Nor, in any event, could Webster show prejudice. Given the overwhelming evidence against him — including at least four videos of the assault — there is no ‘reasonable probability’ that the jury would have acquitted him even if he had asked Officer Rathbun about a closed investigation that involved an entirely different incident occurring five months after Webster’s offenses and that was resolved in the officer’s favor.
For this same reason, arguments of ineffective counsel also fail and so too do Webster’s claims that he was sentenced under inapplicably harsh sentencing enhancements.
The judges explained this, noting Webster’s use of body armor on Jan. 6.
“He put it on that morning, in part, for protection. He wore it throughout the day, including as he attacked Officer Rathbun. Given those facts, the district court correctly applied the enhancement,” they wrote, noting it wasn’t “for warmth and possible protection in the crowd” alone.
Prosecutors originally sought 17 years for Webster, but as Law&Crime previously reported, he was sentenced to 10 years in September 2022.
The appeals court said it crunched the stats: Sentences Webster invoked in his appeal were overwhelmingly from defendants who struck a plea deal. Other cases were incomparable for the simple unique violence of Webster’s charges. He hit the “trifecta,” the court said, noting he wore body armor as he assaulted police and was an instigator in the crowd.
The court also reminded Webster of the words from his judge at sentencing.
“It’s not until you arrive, Mr. Webster, that all hell broke loose. It was your actions, at least on that part of the police line, that opened up the police line and allowed thousands of people through, many of whom ended up inside that Capitol building,” U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta said in 2022.
You were the one who was harassing Officer Rathbun, Mehta says. “No doubt about it. You were the one, with extraordinary force, who pulled the officer down…seriously hurt him…and when the barriers opened, nobody pushed you forward. You ran. You charged ahead.”
— Brandi Buchman (@Brandi_Buchman) September 1, 2022
The post ‘Each of those objections fails’: Unanimous appeals court rejects juror bias claims of ex-NYPD officer convicted of attacking cop on Jan. 6 first appeared on Law & Crime.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Brandi Buchman
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, https://lawandcrime.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.