The phrase “racist rednecks” is threatening to derail a federal murder trial as jurors prepare to decide whether the 24-year-old they convicted should be put to death or allowed to live out his life in prison.

A federal judge is expected to rule today on the defense’s demand for a mistrial based on several jurors’ admissions that, through indirect exposure to media reports, they’d heard that defendant Rejon Taylor had referred to them as “racist rednecks.”

While Mr. Taylor’s defense team has long called the comment inaccurate — it was first uttered by federal prosecutor Steve Neff as he described a series of recorded phones calls the defendant made from jail — they contend it still represents a “personal attack” on the people who are now responsible for Mr. Taylor’s life.

“The question is: Has the jury been prejudiced, and is there something we can do to cure that taint?” defense attorney Leslie Cory told U.S. District Judge Curtis L. Collier during a hearing Thursday. “Our answer is ‘no.’”

The “rednecks” remark first surfaced during a hearing in mid-September in which the jury was not present. Mr. Neff said in open court that Mr. Taylor called the jurors a bunch of “racist rednecks” during one of several recorded phone calls he made to friends and family in the wake of his conviction for the 2003 shooting death of Atlanta restaurant owner Guy Luck.

In its quest to convince the jury to impose the death penalty, the prosecution wanted to use the conversations as evidence of Mr. Taylor’s lack of remorse for Mr. Luck’s death.

However, the transcripts of those conversations, which were not made public until a few days later, revealed that Mr. Taylor called the verdict “racist” in one remark and the jurors “little redneck-looking folks” in another. He did not call them “racist rednecks,” according to the transcripts.

But the damage already was done, Ms. Cory argued, and it led to the publication of the remark the next day in the Chattanooga Times Free Press. Local news channels also reported the remark, and it became a topic of discussion on local talk radio as well.

It was during a weeklong break from the court proceedings that 11 jurors said they inadvertently were exposed to the comment.

The defense team later would ask Judge Collier to “admonish” Mr. Neff and the U.S. attorney’s office for making the “reckless statement” and causing a “news media frenzy.”

“Obviously, I combined two sentences from the same conversation,” Mr. Neff admitted Thursday in court, while also telling the judge he believed the news media had inaccurately quoted his statements that day.

Just hours before, the prosecution had filed a motion to ban the media from the hearing Thursday, but Judge Collier denied the request.

Mr. Neff said he did not believe the prosecution ever misrepresented the content of Mr. Taylor’s conversations. He said the “dirty little secret” of the trial is that the defense actually wants the jurors to be prejudiced.

“They want a mistrial. They want the jury to be tainted,” Mr. Neff said. “They don’t want this jury anymore because they’ve found the defendant guilty.”

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