HAMMOND | A man accused of encouraging others to kill the president wants to prevent prosecutors from inciting "racial passion" among jurors during his trial next week.
The man who is accused of making the threats on the Internet is Vikram Buddhi, an Indian national who has lived in the United States for more than a decade while attending engineering classes at Purdue University.
Buddhi's appointed defense attorney, John Martin, is concerned because much of Buddhi's "crude" online commentary is directed toward "Anglo-Saxon" people who are likely to form most of Northern Indiana's jury pool, court records filed Friday say.
Martin wants U.S. District Judge James Moody to prohibit prosecutors and witnesses from mentioning Buddhi's ethnicity during the trial, which is set to begin Monday morning in federal court in Hammond.
Prosecutors say that on three occasions in December 2005 and January 2006, Buddhi posted messages in Yahoo! Finance message boards urging Iraqi militants to kill the president and other government figures and to attack Americans.
"Kill GW Bush ... Rape And Kill Laura Bush ... Kill Donald Rumsfeld The Old Geezer Crook ... Rape And Kill The Anglosaxon Republicans," Buddhi wrote Dec. 15, 2005, in a message board devoted to chatter about the technology company JDS Uniphase.
Martin has said that although the speech was admittedly crude and offensive, it was protected by the First Amendment because the messages were intended as a protest of the Iraq War, not "true threats" that Buddhi intended someone to carry out.
Martin already has tried to convince Moody to dismiss the case on First Amendment grounds, but the judge ruled that only a jury could decide what Buddhi's true intentions were in posting the messages.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Philip Benson disclosed in court files that he intends to argue at trial that Buddhi's attempts to use other Purdue students' Internet Protocol addresses to conceal his online identity is evidence of his guilt.
Although the advanced engineering student used other people's IP addresses, Purdue eventually connected Buddhi with the postings using a second type of digital identifier called a Media Access Control address.
"Buddhi's use of stolen IP addresses to conceal his computer's identity is no different from a defendant who uses a false ID to hide his identity while committing a crime," Benson wrote.
