Three Sessions hearing protesters found guilty
A jury on Wednesday convicted three Code Pink activists on charges related to a protest at the confirmation hearing of Jeff Sessions for attorney general — including a Virginia woman who said all she did was break out in laughter.
Each of the three protesters faces up to 12 months in jail, $2,000 in fines, or both, depending on the outcome of a June 21 sentencing hearing.
The woman with the laugh, Desiree A. Fairooz, 61, of Bluemont, Va., said she was undeterred.
“We’ll face the music when we get to that,” she said.
A two-day trial in District of Columbia Superior Court in Washington ended Tuesday. All three had pleaded not guilty, rejected a plea deal and demanded the trial.
I n v e r d i c t s r e t u r n e d shortly after noon Wednesday, the jury also convicted t wo other activists in the group she was with, Tighe Barry and Lenny Bianchi, who had dressed as Ku Klux Klan members with white hoods and robes and stood up before the Jan. 10 hearing started.
In an April court filing, the office of the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia had argued that all three protesters shared a common goal to “impede and disrupt” the hearing. Fairooz, the office said, had “created a scene.”
It was early in the hearing when Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., said that Sessions’ record of “treating all Americans equally under the law is clear and well-documented,” Ariel Gold, the campaign director of Code Pink, said on Wednesday.
Fairooz said that upon hearing that, she let out a giggle.
“I just couldn’t hold it,” she said Wednesday. “It was spontaneous. It was an immediate rejection of what I considered an outright lie or pure ignorance.”
She said when officers c ame over, she expected to be warned or told to shush and was surprised to be taken into custody.
Prosecutors described her actions differently.
Fairooz had “let out a loud burst of laughter, followed by a second louder burst of laughter,” the U.S. attorney’s office said in the filing. Police then tried to “quietly escort” Fairooz from the room, but she “grew loud and more disruptive, eventually halting the confirmation hearing,” the court papers said.
As she was escorted away, Fairooz loudly asked, “Why a m I b e i n g t a ke n o u t o f here?” She also said that Sessions’ “voting record is evil.”
Fairooz was found guilty of the two charges she faced: one of disorderly and disruptive conduct and a charge of parading or demonstrating on Capitol grounds, according to her lawyer, Samuel A. Bogash.