All posts tagged "Jurors"

Pro-Donald Trump corners of social media are already running wild with a new development in former President Donald Trump's criminal conviction in Manhattan, proclaiming this is the end of the verdict and it will be thrown out.

This comes after Judge Juan Merchan revealed that a reply to a Facebook post on the New York state court system page purported to be from a cousin of a juror and to have knowledge Trump would be convicted. If a juror did actually reveal verdict information to an outside person before it was handed down, it would pose a serious problem for the case on appeal.

But it is unclear whether this is actually a problem for the verdict, according to some legal experts, given that there's no public evidence the Facebook poster in question is actually related to a juror and actually knew the outcome beforehand, and the time stamp doesn't even definitively confirm the post dropped before the jury reached their decision. At least some reporters strongly suspect the whole thing is fake....

With former President Donald Trump convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records this week, his furious supporters are trying to expose the identities of the people who did it.

According to NBC News, "Advance Democracy, a non-profit that conducts public interest research, said there has been a high volume of social media posts containing violent rhetoric targeting New York Judge Juan Merchan and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, including a post with Bragg’s purported home address. The group also found posts of the purported addresses of jurors on a fringe internet message board known for pro-Trump content and harassing and violent posts, although it is unclear if any actual jurors had been correctly identified."

One user reportedly posted, "Dox the Jurors. Dox them now." Another wrote, “We need to identify each juror. Then make them miserable. Maybe even suicidal.”...

Four days into the historic trial of Donald Trump's criminal hush money case was enough. So his attorneys are desperately lobbing "Hail Mary" legal filings in an attempt to put the whole thing on ice.

"A fair and impartial jury cannot be selected in New York county as evidenced by the extreme difficulty in procuring a venire resulting from the the significant bias against president trump that permeates the jury pool," reads a motion put forward to the New York Court of Appeals on Friday night by former President Donald Trump's legal team.

Reporter Joey Pagliery first flagged the emergency brake efforts of Trump to scuttle the trial as it's already begun....

Former President Donald Trump's attacks of the prospective jurors in his Manhattan hush money criminal trial is a sharp new escalation of his disparagement of the legal system, said CNN analyst Elliot Williams on Thursday.

This comes after Trump, who for days now has had to sit through attorneys sifting through mean social media posts about him in the courtroom, lashed out on his Truth Social platform and quoted Fox News' Jesse Watters saying that "undercover liberal activists" were being exposed in the jury pool. As of Thursday afternoon, a full jury has been selected to hear the case.

"It's reprehensible, and the judge is going to determine whether it's a violation of, steps really close to that line," Williams told anchor Jake Tapper. "Now the question is, what does the judge do with it? And the judge can't just slap cuffs on the former president and cart him off to jail. It's got to have a hearing, which is already going to be in another five days. He's letting this stay out there for a few days. Now do you fine him? Do you figure out a way to get him behind bars?"...

The judge presiding over former President Donald Trump's criminal hush money trial in New York has ordered that the identities of the jurors will be concealed from the general public, amid credible fears that they could be subject to tampering, reported Law360's Frank G. Runyeon Thursday.

"The names of the jurors in Donald Trump's hush money case will be kept secret," wrote Runyeon. However, he added, Judge Juan Merchan ruled that Trump, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and the attorneys for both sides will still know their identities and addresses.

Among the "remarkable" findings underyling this decision, Runyeon noted, is that Merchan wrote, "The Court further finds good cause ... 'that there is a likelihood of bribery, jury tampering, or of physical injury or harassment of jurors,'" and that the former president has "an extensive history of publicly and repeatedly attacking trial jurors and grand jurors."...

E. Jean Carroll's massive $83.3 million civil judgment against former President Donald Trump on Friday is a huge blow to the former president — and a real, devastating consequence for the former president spending months repeating the same claims against her already ruled defamatory by a prior jury.

That's the view of former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissman, who weighed in on MSNBC that evening.

"It brings me back to an argument that Carroll's attorneys made during closing arguments which was this, this trial is also about something much more profound, whether the rules that apply to everyone else, to you, to me, to Miss Carroll, whether they also apply to Donald Trump, and it feels when I hear that total, $83.3 million in damages, that that was the jury's answer in some ways to that macro question," said anchor Alicia Menendez....