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Breaking news. It looks like the jury convicted Donald Trump in the "hush money" case.
This verdict will likely galvanize voters come November – leading to record turnout among Republicans. I might even vote for the old rascal myself as I view this lawfare as both morally wrong and deeply destabilizing.
To make a prediction closer to home, we're now certain to cross 1000 posts on the weekly thread.
There was some absolute fuckery involved in the jury instructions in my opinion. I'm curious for some of the lawyers who post here to weigh in. As I understand it:
In order for there to be a felony conviction in NY, there has to be a modifier to the "falsifying business records" charge. So you have to falsify business records in pursuit of another crime.
There were three possible modifiers here for Trump to go from a misdemeanor charge to a felony.
The slimy part (from my understanding) is that the judge said that they didn't actually have to agree on which of these modifiers he committed. You just had to get 12 people to agree that he had done something. So you could do 4, 4, and 4 all voting on each of the 3 options, with a majority disagreeing that he was actually guilty of the modifier.
Wild stuff.
AP seems to keep updating this page, which is very annoying, but it does explain the jury instructions: https://apnews.com/live/trump-trial-jury-deliberations-updates#0000018f-c551-d5ca-abff-d5fda72d0000
Interestingly, they say this is "fact check: false", and then go on to explain exactly what it is true, lol.
This is accurate though, isn't it? As long as all 12 agree that "Trump falsified business records in pursuit of a crime" then he's guilty of that. The bigger question is how they could agree he did so in pursuit of a crime without him being indicted for that crime. This is the same whether there are 3 potential crimes or just 1. Is it a crime if he was never indicted? Sounds like it's a poorly worded law (maybe intentionally so) which was used to throw the book at him.
If only it were that simple.
There were 34 counts and Trump was found guilty on all 34. It's unbelievable that the jury could even understand the charges, let alone have a responsible deliberation on all 34 charges.
They are 34 iterations of the same charge. (12 monthly payments to Cohen, each of which involves a chequebook stub, a cancelled cheque, and an entry in the ledger, all of which are false business business records. Not sure why 2 of the 36 were not charged). This is stupid, but it is SOP when you are trying to try a case in the media (because it makes the charges look more serious) or trying to scare an unrepresented defendant into a plea bargain (because you can multiply the jail term you are threatening by 34, even though real criminal sentencing doesn't work like that).
You don't need to be any smarter than the average juror to understand this when it is explained to you. Absent a technical issue with one of the pieces of paperwork, the correct verdict is obviously the same on all 34 charges. Charging all of them does nothing except waste a small amount of the jury foreman's time saying "Guilty" over and over.
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