By Luc Cohen
New York (Reuters) -A black jury member was fired on Monday from Sean “Diddy” Combs' sex trade process, despite the objections of the defense that the dismissal would reduce the racial diversity of the panel that the fate of the hip -hop moguls determine.
The American district judge Arun Subramanian said that the inconsistent answers from the jury member to questions about where he lived could raise questions about his honesty and a verdict.
Subramanian said he took the concern about the breed seriously – Combs is black – but could not take into account that the black male jury member would be replaced by a white man who had been an alternative jury member.
“The court may indeed not allow Race to violate its attention,” Subramanian said outside the presence of the jury, because the sixth week of the Combs trial started in the Federal Court of Manhattan.
The jury is anonymous, which is common for controversial tests where jury members can be confronted with threats or intimidation if their identity was known.
Subramanian said the jury was 'diverse'.
Combs is not guilty of racketeering and sex trade. Prosecutors say that he has forced women for more than two decades to participate in sexual performances with drugs with male sex workers, sometimes known as “freak offs”. The defense says that the sexual activity described by officers was consensual.
Lawyers for Combs, 55, have argued that their client was unfair because of his race. During an archiving on Sunday evening, lawyers wrote that the jury member in question was one of the two black men in the jury.
“The honesty of the process partly depends on having jury members with backgrounds similar to Mr Combs sharing their perspectives on the evidence with other jury members with different backgrounds during deliberations,” the lawyers of Combs wrote.
In a Monday judge, public prosecutors said that it was “unfounded” for the defense to suggest that they had a racial motivation to request the jury's resignation.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New Yorkditing by Nick Zieminski)
