U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida Judge Aileen Cannon is facing having a verdict in another one of her cases overturned because of a simple error of her own making.
According to a report from the Daily Beast's Jose Pagliery, Cannon, who is currently overseeing a deeply complex and highly scrutinized federal case where former president Donald Trump is accused of obstruction of justice, made an "egregious" error where she did not give a jury an option of finding a defendant "not guilty" and now that verdict is being appealed.
As the report notes, in the case of Christopher Wilkins, she provided jurors with a verdict form that did not list "not guilty" as an option and defense lawyer Jeffrey Garland formally filed an appeal on Thursday.
In an interview, he explained, "How far does somebody have to go to school to say that a verdict form is supposed to say guilty and not guilty? That would be one of the more egregious versions of jury instruction error… it’s such a rare error.”
He added, "This is the judge’s deal. This is nobody else’s deal. I’m gonna tell ya, I’ve done a lot of appeals, and I’ve got a pretty good winning record. This is a great issue."
As the report points out, Cannon has scant trial experience and, combined with her earlier rulings on the investigation into Trump's hoarding of documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort that were overturned by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in rough fashion, the latest episode raises more questions about her competence.
"Last month, The New York Times discovered that Cannon has only handled four trials, collectively accounting for just 14 days in court—less than three weeks of experience before handling a potential turning point for American democracy," the Pagliery wrote. "Last week, Reuters exposed how Cannon kept family members of an accused viewer of child sex abuse locked out of her courtroom during some of his trial in June, violating his Sixth Amendment rights to have a public trial—and somehow forgot to swear in the prospective jury pool, the most basic of mandatory procedures."
As for her latest gaffe, University of Georgia law professor Elizabeth Taxel said of the bungled verdict form, "I’ve never seen anything like it. I am a law professor, and I found it cumbersome to read and follow. It’s unclear to me why the court didn’t, out of an abundance of caution, include ‘guilty or not guilty.’”
Defense attorney Garland was much more brutal in his assessment, telling the Beast, "That’s her verdict form. There’s no ‘guilty’ and ‘not guilty.’ The traditional format is ‘guilty’ and ‘not guilty,’ as it was on the proposed form the government and I had created. We agreed on that. And she comes up with this. This is her creation. This is her baby. It’s kind of funny. It’s ridiculous."
You can read more here.
