Legal professionals for Sean “Diddy” Combs are urging a decide to let potential jurors on the hip-hop mogul’s upcoming intercourse trafficking trial be questioned about their views concerning intercourse, medicine and violence.
The legal professionals raised the topic as they submitted a proposed questionnaire to be crammed out by people summoned for his Could 5 trial in Manhattan federal court docket.
In a letter to a decide late Friday, the legal professionals mentioned they need to know the willingness of would-be jurors to look at movies which can be sexually specific or present bodily assault. Additionally they say they need to know their views towards individuals with a number of sexual companions.
Prosecutors in a letter of their very own criticized the protection’s proposed questionnaire as too lengthy and referring to topics that may be higher requested in particular person by the decide, if in any respect.
They mentioned among the protection’s proposed 72 questions, some containing subparts, had been “utterly irrelevant to the ability to serve on a jury.”
Prosecutors additionally cited the intercourse trafficking trial of Ghislaine Maxwell for example of how a prolonged questionnaire might be damaging.
After Maxwell was convicted of intercourse trafficking in December 2021, a juror admitted that he had did not disclose that he was a intercourse abuse sufferer, blaming his oversight partly on being “distracted as he filled out the questionnaire” and having “skimmed way too fast,” inflicting him to misconceive questions.
Choose Arun Subramanian has instructed legal professionals that questionnaires might be distributed to lots of of potential jurors on the finish of April in order that questioning of potential jurors can start on Could 5, with opening statements possible on Could 12.
Combs, 55, has pleaded not responsible to allegations that he subjected people to sexual abuse over a two-decade interval. The Dangerous Boy Data founder has remained incarcerated with out bail since his September arrest.
An indictment accuses Combs of utilizing the “power and prestige” he wielded as a music mogul to intimidate, threaten and lure ladies into his orbit, usually below the pretense of a romantic relationship.
The indictment mentioned he then used pressure, threats and coercion to trigger victims, together with three ladies specified within the court docket papers, to interact in business intercourse acts.
It mentioned he subjected his victims to violence, threats of violence, threats of economic and reputational hurt and verbal abuse.
Prosecutors have mentioned {that a} key piece of the proof at trial might be a video exhibiting Combs punching his former protege and girlfriend, the R&B singer Cassie, and throwing her on the ground in a lodge hallway.
Protection legal professionals have argued that prosecutors constructed their case on expenses that attempt to demonize intercourse acts between consenting adults.
They instructed the decide they had been unable to succeed in a consensus with prosecutors for what potential jurors needs to be requested on questionnaires.
“The defense believes it is important that we allow potential jurors to write candidly about the unprecedented and negative media attention that they may have been exposed to, related to Mr. Combs,” the legal professionals wrote.
Protection legal professionals additionally requested that jurors be requested to inform in the event that they’ve watched reveals on tv titled: “The Fall of Diddy,” “Diddy Do It?” “The Downfall of Diddy” and “Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy.”
