Of the 1,000 prospective jurors summoned for a high-profile case in Brooklyn, NY and filled out the obligatory questionnaire, one person's answers really stood out.
Juror No. 799, an Asian woman in her 20s who said she works in the garment industry, was up for jury duty in the death penalty trial of Bonanno crime boss Vincent (Vinny Gorgeous) Basciano. It didn't take long for her to start looking worse than the defendant. Asked to name three people she least admired, she wrote on her questionnaire: "African-Americans, Hispanics and Haitians." When the judge asked why she answered the question that way, she replied, "You always hear about them in the news doing something." She also declared that cops are all lazy, claiming that they sound their sirens to bypass traffic jams. Garaufis flipped forward several pages in her questionnaire. He landed on the page where she had said she had a relative who was a member of the Chinese Ghost Shadows gang in the 1980s, convicted of murder and still in prison. "Why didn't you put 'Asians' down also?" the judge asked sarcastically, referring to her list of least-liked people. "Maybe I should have," she said. Assistant U.S. Attorney Taryn Merkl requested that the woman be disqualified from the Vinny Gorgeous case because of her "inappropriate" comments. The motion was granted.
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Federal judge Nicholas Garaufis wasn't finished. Holding up the woman's bile-filled juror questionnaire he told her: "This is an outrage, and so are you!...[you're] coming back [today], Thursday and Friday - and until the future, when I am ready to dismiss [you]." So kids, what have we learned: Don't try to get out of juror duty and don't be a racist!
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