The federal judge in Boston who presided over the case of a man who plotted to kill Americans on behalf of the Islamic State says he doesn’t want jurors’ names unnecessarily spread across the Internet, even though the terror group is on the run, with its once-grand aspirations a “bitter memory among blackened ruins.”
Judge William G. Young said that, in the case of David Daoud Wright’s trial, he would depart from his usual practice of revealing the names and addresses of jurors “since this data may then be plastered permanently” on the Web.
He said he would ask media organizations instead to propose a “protective order that will secure the jurors’ personal identifiers from unnecessary dissemination.”
“Routed and in retreat, their territorial aspirations today but a bitter memory among blackened ruins, ISIS nonetheless remains a viciously dangerous yet shifting and shadowy group of depraved international terrorists,” Young said in an order filed Friday.
“Here, the link to ISIS has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt,” Young wrote.
Young wrote that the Islamic State would someday be “unlamented and mostly forgotten. For now, however, some remain. Fear is their stock in trades — fear they seek to leverage into power through vapid boasts wholly out of touch with reality — ‘alternative facts’ if you will.”
He noted that the Islamic State had boasted in the past that it had the names and addresses of US military personnel and that one had moved in response to their posting. “This Court will provide no aid and comfort to ISIS propaganda,” Young said.
“Therefore, even though there is no credible threat against anyone involved in this prosecution (I’ve checked), I will not follow my usual practice,” he said.
At the same time, he said, “the press should be accorded its constitutionally protected news gathering function.”
“The way to reconcile these national security concerns with the First Amendment is through a carefully crafted protective order,” he said.
Young said that even if he’s satisfied with a proposed order, he will only release the names and hometowns of the jurors, not their addresses.
Boston University, through radio station WBUR-FM, sought the names and addresses of the jurors.
Wright, 28, was convicted Wednesday on five counts, including conspiring to support a terrorist organization and conspiring to commit acts of terrorism beyond national boundaries. He faces a possible life sentence. He is to be sentenced on Dec. 19.
Wright, who lived with his mother in Everett, disseminated Islamic State propaganda online, recruited for the organization, and plotted the death of controversial critic of Islam Pamela Geller with his uncle, Usaamah Rahim, and a third man, the Globe reported.
In June 2015, Rahim, 26, was fatally shot by authorities in a Roslindale parking lot after he advanced on them with a military-style knife. Wright was arrested later that day.