Impartial jurors scarce for terror trial

NEW YORK, Nov. 30 (UPI) -- The debate is on over whether enough impartial New Yorkers could be found to serve on a jury for accused Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists, analysts say.

Most city residents, when asked about a trial for admitted Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and other accused terrorists now being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, responded they could not be impartial, The Washington Post reported Monday.

"Oh, no. No. I have no impartiality," Laura Stein, 45, told the newspaper. "It was the worst day of my life. And I didn't lose anybody."

"I say hang 'em," added Georgianna Neller, a state Health Department investigator, pointing to the hole where the New York's World Trade Center used to be. "Hang 'em right over there. Put the girder up."

But Anthony Barkow, a former federal prosecutor who runs the Center on the Administration of Criminal Law at New York University, told the Post impartial jurors can be found.

"Anybody who was in New York on 9/11, or D.C., was touched personally by it," he said. "But there are different levels of that, and there are different levels of how people have subsequently dealt with that."