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Judge won’t move trial of Seattle terror defendant

The Columbian
Published: March 4, 2012, 4:00pm

SEATTLE (AP) — A federal judge says he won’t move the trial of a man accused of planning to attack a Seattle military recruiting station out of Western Washington.

Lawyers for Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif said pretrial news coverage of the case, along with the region’s connection to military bases and defense contractors like Boeing, would make it difficult or impossible to seat a fair jury.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Seattle hired pollster Stuart Elway to research how much the news coverage might have tainted the jury pool. Even after the poll’s respondents were told the basics of the case, 71 percent could not remember hearing about it.

U.S. District Judge James L. Robart said Monday that given those results, the court should be able to find 14 or 15 impartial jurors out of the more than 2 million candidates in the region.

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