On Wednesday, a jury convicted three Code Pink protesters on charges of disrupting Jeff Sessions’s attorney general confirmation hearing.
Three of our activists found GUILTY"disorderly conduct & parading on Capitol grounds" #StopSessions #PeacefulProtest https://t.co/NpsJWjVVfx
— CODEPINK (@codepink) May 3, 2017
The protesters now face up to 12 months in prison, the New York Times reports. One of the convicted protesters, 61-year-old Desiree A. Fairooz, maintains that all she did during the hearing was laugh when Senator Richard Shelby said Sessions had a “clear and well-documented” record of “treating all Americans equally under the law.”
The verdicts were returned after a two-day trial in Washington. Fairooz was found guilty of disorderly conduct and parading or demonstrating on Capitol grounds, the Times reports. Two other activists she was with during the January 10 hearing, Tighe Barry and Lenny Bianchi, were acquitted of disorderly conduct, but convicted on two separate charges of parading or demonstrating. During Sessions’s hearing, Barry and Bianchi dressed as Ku Klux Klan members and pretended to support Sessions before the hearing started.
Each of the three protesters faces up to 12 months in jail, $2,000 in fines, or both.
