WASHINGTON ― Three anti-Muslim extremists arrested ahead of the 2016 election, and charged with plotting a terrorist attack that would have killed Somali refugees, wanted a jury pulled from a rural part of Kansas that’s even more pro-Trump than the area where they’re set to face trial.
But a federal judge shut down their request this week, ruling that selecting jurors from an area where Donald Trump won by nearly 28 points in the 2016 presidential contest ― instead of an area where he won by almost 55 points ― would still allow the defendants to be tried before a jury that reflected a “fair cross-section of the community.”
Authorities arrested Patrick Stein, Gavin Wright and Curtis Allen in October 2016, alleging they were part of a militia group known as the “Crusaders” with “sovereign citizen, anti-government, anti-Muslim, and anti-immigrant extremist beliefs.” The men allegedly said they wanted to “wake people up” by using a bomb to kill Muslim immigrants living in Garden City, Kansas.
They allegedly stockpiled weapons, ammunition and explosives, and talked about setting off four car bombs inside an apartment complex that housed Somali refugees.
Allen’s federal public defender, in a motion last month that was joined by federal taxpayer-funded attorneys for the two other defendants, argued that the case was “uniquely political because much of the anticipated evidence will center around, and was in reaction to” the 2016 presidential election.
They argued that the jury division the jurors will be pulled from was “more urban” than the “more rural” division they wanted included, and that it would lead to the “exclusion of a disproportionate portion of residents holding certain conservative political beliefs.”
While Trump won by 27.89 percentage points in the Wichita-Hutchinson jury division, they wrote, he beat Hillary Clinton by 54.76 percentage points in the Dodge City jury division.
“Stated another way, a prospective juror who lives in a county within the Dodge City jury division is twice as likely to be a Trump voter than the prospective juror who lives in a county within the Wichita-Hutchinson jury division,” the attorneys argued.