WASHINGTON ― A woman convicted after laughing during a confirmation hearing for Attorney General Jeff Sessions is scheduled to be sentenced on Friday, and Justice Department prosecutors are asking a D.C. judge to uphold the jury’s guilty verdict.
Desiree Fairooz, an activist affiliated with the group Code Pink, was taken into custody at a Senate hearing in January after she laughed when Sessions’ former colleague said the now-attorney general had a “clear and well-documented” record of “treating all Americans equally under the law.” (Sessions had been rejected as a federal judge in the 1980s over concerns about his views on race.)
Fairooz has asked the judge to toss the jury’s verdict. Through her lawyer, Fairooz argued that her “brief reflexive burst of noise” could not sustain a conviction, and that the jury that convicted her “was not reasonable in its evaluation of the evidence.”
But in court documents filed last week ahead of Fairooz’s scheduled sentencing on Friday, prosecutors wrote that the jury “could have reasonably rejected” Fairooz’s contention that her laugh was a reflexive reaction to a claim about Sessions’ record that she found absurd.
In a court filing signed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Kimberly Paschall, the government argued that the jury “could reasonably infer that the laugh was a deliberate disruption” and “intentional.”