Woman who laughed at Jeff Sessions gets conviction thrown out

Activist Desiree Fairooz was found guilty in May of charges of disorderly and disruptive conduct

Desiree Fairooz was detained and charged with disorderly conduct (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

Rather than sentencing a woman to jail time for laughing during now-Attorney General Jeff Sessions' confirmation hearing, a judge has thrown out the jury’s conviction of the protester and called for a new trial.

Code Pink activist Desiree Fairooz, 61, was found guilty in May of charges of disorderly and disruptive conduct and of parading or demonstrating on Capitol grounds. But Chief Judge Robert E Morin of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia found that the government had improperly argued during the trial that her laughter was enough to merit a guilty verdict.

“The court is concerned about the government’s theory,” Mr Morin said. He said the laughter “would not be sufficient” to submit the case to the jury, adding that the government had not made clear before the trial that it intended to make that argument, according to the Huffington Post.

Ms Fairooz had been convicted along with two other Code Pink activists, Tighe Barry and Lenny Bianchi, who were dressed as members of the Ku Klux Klan as commentary on what the group described as Sessions' racist past.

Each of the three protesters faced up to 12 months in jail, $2,000 in fines, or both.

Ms Fairooz told NBC News that Mr Barry and Mr Bianchi avoided jail time but had to pay fines.

In an April court filing, the US Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia had argued that all three protesters shared a common goal to “impede and disrupt” Mr Sessions’ confirmation hearing. Ms Fairooz, the office said, had “created a scene.”

It was early in the hearing when Republican Senator Richard Shelby said that Mr Sessions’ record of “treating all Americans equally under the law is clear and well-documented,” Ariel Gold, the campaign director of Code Pink, told The New York Times in May.

After hearing that, Ms Fairooz said, she let out a giggle.

“In response to this statement, Defendant Fairooz … let out aloud [sic] burst of laughter, followed by a second louder burst of laughter,” according to court documents.

“I just couldn’t hold it,” Ms Fairooz told The Times. “It was spontaneous. It was an immediate rejection of what I considered an outright lie or pure ignorance.”

After Ms Fairooz laughed, officers came over and took her into custody.

Ms Fairooz’s attorney, Sam Bogash, had asked the judge to throw out the jury verdict, writing that the jury “was not reasonable” in its evaluation of evidence.

“Ms Fairooz’s brief reflexive burst of noise, be it laughter or an audible gasp, clearly cannot sustain a conviction for either of the counts in the information,” Mr Bogash wrote in a court filing. “So the only other basis for her conviction to anything are her statements after the US Capitol Police arrested her for that laughing. Those statements merely expressed surprise at being arrested.”

The US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia did not immediately return a request for comment.