Oregon trial of the Iranian-American leader of an Islamic charity branch of using appeals to provoke prejudice and emotion that included waving the Qoran in the air and throwing it on the table in front of jurors.
The lawyers cited those coimplaints in an appeal for a new trial for Pirouz Sedaghaty, known in Oregon as Pete Seda.
Seda was convicted Sept. 9 of conspiracy to defraud the government and filing a false tax return in what prosecutors alleged was a plot to smuggle $150,000 to Muslim fighters in Chechnya by using the Ashland, Oregon, branch of a Saudi Arabian charity, Al-Haramain.
The government began investigating Al-Haramain shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a date that figured in the defense motion.
The defense also objected that on the morning the verdict was reached, a juror was seen at breakfast in a Eugene hotel reading a front-page story in USA Today about the plan of a Florida pastor to burn a Qoran.
In 2004, the US government declared Al-Haramain a terrorist organization, seizing and selling its assets, including the house in Ashland that served as US headquarters for the charity and Seda’s home. The Saudi Arabian government dissolved the parent organization.
Unless Judge Michael Hogan grants the motion for a new trial, the filing is likely to be the basis for an appeal of Seda’s conviction to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Chris Cardani was named in the filing as the prosecutor who waved “the Qoran around and then tossed it down on the table directly in front of the jury.”
During the trial, prosecutors said Al-Haramain distributed the Qoran to U.S prison inmates, with non-Muslims receiving a regular Qoran while Muslim prisoners got a translation with an appendix calling for violence against Jews and nonbelievers, a version they called the “Noble Qoran.”
The defense motion argues that Cardani waved the Noble Qoran as he spoke to the jury about its distribution to “violent people, serving time.”
The defense said the use of the Qoran “had the effect of allowing jurors to act based on emotion and also profoundly disrespected the defendant’s religion.”
The action was part of a trial “tainted with fear of Muslims, Islam and terrorism,” the defense said.
Seda came to the United States for college and later became a US citizen. .
