Professor Joe Comments for Washington Post on Mosque Bombing Conspiracy Case

Professor Irene Oritseweyinmi Joe commented for the Washington Post on the case of three Kansas men accused of plotting to massacre Muslim immigrants. The men have asked the judge in their case to make sure that the jury includes people from parts of the state that voted overwhelmingly for President Trump in the 2016 election.

Professor Joe said that such requests aren’t out of the ordinary in a federal criminal case. In federal court, lawyers are generally more restricted in their ability to question prospective jurors than in state courts, so they look for different ways to seat a jury more likely to fit their theory of the case, she said.

“Because there’s no automatic constitutional guarantee to a particular type of juror, except for the right to an impartial juror, the lawyers recognize that filing a motion in advance to say that the jury pool is problematic is one way for them to have a say in the jurors that they might get,” said Joe.

Born in Nigeria, Joe has a B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin and a J.D. from Stanford Law School. She has clerked with Judge Napoleon Jones of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California and served as Assistant Special Litigation Counsel at the Orleans Public Defenders in New Orleans, Assistant Training Director with the Louisiana Public Defender Board, and Binder Teaching Fellow at UCLA School of Law. Her interests as a legal scholar include examining how ethical and professional rules guide attorney behavior in under-resourced criminal justice systems.