Louisville, Ky. — In a speech this morning, Rand Paul argued that the right to trial by jury for terrorists should be a bipartisan cause.

“You can’t have fear of terrorism be so much that you’re going to give up on the right to trial by jury,” Paul told attendees at the Kentucky Farm Bureau ham breakfast.


“Do I have any sympathy for the Boston bombers? No,” he continued. “I’ll go up there, when they’re convicted, I’m happy to hold the switch.”

“I have no understanding of people who kill innocent civilians like that,” Paul added. “But do I want these bad people to have a trial? I do. Because it’s what makes America great.”

Paul highlighted past mistakes – such as the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II – when making his case.

“Richard Jewell was said to be the Olympic bomber,” Paul said in reference to the 1996 Olympics bombing in Atlanta. “Everyone said he met the profile, this guy’s got to be guilty. If he’d been a black man in 1920, he’d have been strung up from . . . a tree, but because we live in a country that has due process,” he wasn’t.