NY: Convicted Felon Donald Trump!

[brucejoel99]

Wonder if Trump is going to try and flee the country? If he thinks a guilty verdict is likely, no telling what he'll do. He has a plane after all

I think in the event of a guilty verdict and if Trump wanted to avoid the penalty, he could just stay in Florida. Ron DeSantis would never extradite him to New York.

NY can just request U.S. Marshals' assistance if DeSantis refuses state & local cooperation.

[mjba257]

Wonder if Trump is going to try and flee the country? If he thinks a guilty verdict is likely, no telling what he'll do. He has a plane after all

I think in the event of a guilty verdict and if Trump wanted to avoid the penalty, he could just stay in Florida. Ron DeSantis would never extradite him to New York.

RDS would never but the Federal Marshalls would. If he wants safety from extradition, he'd go someplace that has either 1) no extradition treaty or 2) has a leader who likes Trump. El Salvador and Argentina both come to mind as their leaders are without question pro-Trump. El Salvador is within range for a 757 nonstop from NYC. Buenos Aires, OTOH, might be in range from Palm Beach, so he'd need to stop for fuel, which is a risk. Brazil, meanwhile, lacks an extradition treaty but Lula is no ally of Trump

[Lief 🗽]

I’ve done a few trials, but only in federal court. I’ve litigated plenty in NY state court, but never in a case that went all the way to trial. My overall impression from this case is that NY state court trial rules are very strange, it’s bizarre that the jury doesn’t get to have a print out of the jury instructions with them.

The other thing I’ll say is that juries are very random, and it’s fun to try to read the tea leaves based on the questions ask, how long they are taking, etc but in practice this stuff does not follow logic/reason.

[GeorgiaModerate]

Wonder if Trump is going to try and flee the country? If he thinks a guilty verdict is likely, no telling what he'll do. He has a plane after all

I think in the event of a guilty verdict and if Trump wanted to avoid the penalty, he could just stay in Florida. Ron DeSantis would never extradite him to New York.

Sure.  "Convicted felon Donald Trump is a fugitive from justice" would look great in Biden campaign ads.

[Ljube]

Wonder if Trump is going to try and flee the country? If he thinks a guilty verdict is likely, no telling what he'll do. He has a plane after all

I think in the event of a guilty verdict and if Trump wanted to avoid the penalty, he could just stay in Florida. Ron DeSantis would never extradite him to New York.

Sure.  "Convicted felon Donald Trump is a fugitive from justice" would look great in Biden campaign ads.

How about "persecuted freedom fighter Donald Trump in exile to avoid the heavy hand of the Biden injustice system".

[Holmes]

Wonder if Trump is going to try and flee the country? If he thinks a guilty verdict is likely, no telling what he'll do. He has a plane after all

I think in the event of a guilty verdict and if Trump wanted to avoid the penalty, he could just stay in Florida. Ron DeSantis would never extradite him to New York.

Sure.  "Convicted felon Donald Trump is a fugitive from justice" would look great in Biden campaign ads.

How about "persecuted freedom fighter Donald Trump in exile to avoid the heavy hand of the Biden injustice system".

This case has no connection to Biden or the federal government, so that would be pretty weak.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Wonder if Trump is going to try and flee the country? If he thinks a guilty verdict is likely, no telling what he'll do. He has a plane after all

I think in the event of a guilty verdict and if Trump wanted to avoid the penalty, he could just stay in Florida. Ron DeSantis would never extradite him to New York.

How is he going to just stay in Florida if he wants to be elected President?

[Yoda]

I am surprised they didn't get copies of the judge's instructions.  Is that a New York state practice?  In Georgia, we got printed copies of the instructions for each juror, so we could refer to them during deliberation.

Yeah in PA at least we got one copy (for the foreman) of basically everything that we needed - counts, definitions, etc. Basically all of the info because the judge wasn't going to repeat basically anything else.

This was basically my experience when I was on a jury in Ohio as well. Detailed definitions of the charges, a "roadmap" if you will of how we were to go about deciding innocence or guilt on each count, etc. Also all the evidence we saw at trial was given to us to look at/watch as much as we needed to in the juror room.

[Ljube]

Wonder if Trump is going to try and flee the country? If he thinks a guilty verdict is likely, no telling what he'll do. He has a plane after all

I think in the event of a guilty verdict and if Trump wanted to avoid the penalty, he could just stay in Florida. Ron DeSantis would never extradite him to New York.

How is he going to just stay in Florida if he wants to be elected President?

He can stay in his basement.
If he is elected President, he will then be immune from any New York warrant.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Ironically Nicaragua or Venezuela might be Trump's best bet to flee to as those countries would obviously never extradite him and it'd be a terrible look...but any fleeing would. Would be amusing to see the MAGAts try to spin that or how Ortega or Maduro is actually good now...of course one of Trump's lawyers in his documents case ran into some issues because he worked for and lobbied for the Venezuelan government. Would also have some interesting electoral implications in South Florida. But I doubt Trump would want to stay in such a place. Some noted the "safest" place for him with no extradition treaty and a Trump property is Azerbaijan, but getting there could be a logistical issue.

[GeorgiaModerate]

Wonder if Trump is going to try and flee the country? If he thinks a guilty verdict is likely, no telling what he'll do. He has a plane after all

I think in the event of a guilty verdict and if Trump wanted to avoid the penalty, he could just stay in Florida. Ron DeSantis would never extradite him to New York.

Sure.  "Convicted felon Donald Trump is a fugitive from justice" would look great in Biden campaign ads.

How about "persecuted freedom fighter Donald Trump in exile to avoid the heavy hand of the Biden injustice system".

You know, the whole "Biden is behind this" is one of the stupidest current talking points on the right.  You do know that the DA for the Southern District of New York -- that is, the DOJ -- PASSED on bringing these charges as a federal criminal case against Trump?  The New York State DA independently chose to bring the state case that is currently underway.  Don't you think that if the "Biden DOJ" really wanted to prosecute Trump for this, they would have brought their OWN case against him?

[Ljube]

Wonder if Trump is going to try and flee the country? If he thinks a guilty verdict is likely, no telling what he'll do. He has a plane after all

I think in the event of a guilty verdict and if Trump wanted to avoid the penalty, he could just stay in Florida. Ron DeSantis would never extradite him to New York.

Sure.  "Convicted felon Donald Trump is a fugitive from justice" would look great in Biden campaign ads.

How about "persecuted freedom fighter Donald Trump in exile to avoid the heavy hand of the Biden injustice system".

You know, the whole "Biden is behind this" is one of the stupidest current talking points on the right.  You do know that the DA for the Southern District of New York -- that is, the DOJ -- PASSED on bringing these charges as a federal criminal case against Trump?  The New York State DA independently chose to bring the state case that is currently underway.  Don't you think that if the "Biden DOJ" really wanted to prosecute Trump for this, they would have brought their OWN case against him?

No, because by bringing the case through a proxy they can claim they are not involved, when in fact they are.
And don't play dumb.
Bragg would never have brought the charges if Biden had told him not to.

[Progressive Pessimist]

Wonder if Trump is going to try and flee the country? If he thinks a guilty verdict is likely, no telling what he'll do. He has a plane after all

I think in the event of a guilty verdict and if Trump wanted to avoid the penalty, he could just stay in Florida. Ron DeSantis would never extradite him to New York.

Sure.  "Convicted felon Donald Trump is a fugitive from justice" would look great in Biden campaign ads.

How about "persecuted freedom fighter Donald Trump in exile to avoid the heavy hand of the Biden injustice system".

You know, the whole "Biden is behind this" is one of the stupidest current talking points on the right.  You do know that the DA for the Southern District of New York -- that is, the DOJ -- PASSED on bringing these charges as a federal criminal case against Trump?  The New York State DA independently chose to bring the state case that is currently underway.  Don't you think that if the "Biden DOJ" really wanted to prosecute Trump for this, they would have brought their OWN case against him?

Don't forget about how "Biden's" Justice Department is also biased against his own son in charging him. Not to mention Menendez and Cuellar.

Oh, wait! That's just to project the illusion of fairness, that's right! There's a mental gymnastics routine for everything!

[emailking]

No, because by bringing the case through a proxy they can claim they are not involved, when in fact they are.
And don't play dumb.
Bragg would never have brought the charges if Biden had told him not to.

Why didn't Biden just tell Vance to bring the charges? He passed on this case.

[GeorgiaModerate]

Wonder if Trump is going to try and flee the country? If he thinks a guilty verdict is likely, no telling what he'll do. He has a plane after all

I think in the event of a guilty verdict and if Trump wanted to avoid the penalty, he could just stay in Florida. Ron DeSantis would never extradite him to New York.

Sure.  "Convicted felon Donald Trump is a fugitive from justice" would look great in Biden campaign ads.

How about "persecuted freedom fighter Donald Trump in exile to avoid the heavy hand of the Biden injustice system".

You know, the whole "Biden is behind this" is one of the stupidest current talking points on the right.  You do know that the DA for the Southern District of New York -- that is, the DOJ -- PASSED on bringing these charges as a federal criminal case against Trump?  The New York State DA independently chose to bring the state case that is currently underway.  Don't you think that if the "Biden DOJ" really wanted to prosecute Trump for this, they would have brought their OWN case against him?

No, because by bringing the case through a proxy they can claim they are not involved, when in fact they are.
And don't play dumb.
Bragg would never have brought the charges if Biden had told him not to.

[Ljube]

No, because by bringing the case through a proxy they can claim they are not involved, when in fact they are.
And don't play dumb.
Bragg would never have brought the charges if Biden had told him not to.

Why didn't Biden just tell Vance to bring the charges? He passed on this case.

Biden didn't tell anyone to bring any charges.
He just didn't stop anyone from bringing charges.

[emailking]

No, because by bringing the case through a proxy they can claim they are not involved, when in fact they are.
And don't play dumb.
Bragg would never have brought the charges if Biden had told him not to.

Why didn't Biden just tell Vance to bring the charges? He passed on this case.

Biden didn't tell anyone to bring any charges.
He just didn't stop anyone from bringing charges.

Either you're very confused or just trolling at this point.

[GeorgiaModerate]

No, because by bringing the case through a proxy they can claim they are not involved, when in fact they are.
And don't play dumb.
Bragg would never have brought the charges if Biden had told him not to.

Why didn't Biden just tell Vance to bring the charges? He passed on this case.

Biden didn't tell anyone to bring any charges.
He just didn't stop anyone from bringing charges.

Do you think that could possibly be because he has no authority over the state of New York?

[wbrocks67]

I am surprised they didn't get copies of the judge's instructions.  Is that a New York state practice?  In Georgia, we got printed copies of the instructions for each juror, so we could refer to them during deliberation.

Yeah in PA at least we got one copy (for the foreman) of basically everything that we needed - counts, definitions, etc. Basically all of the info because the judge wasn't going to repeat basically anything else.

This was basically my experience when I was on a jury in Ohio as well. Detailed definitions of the charges, a "roadmap" if you will of how we were to go about deciding innocence or guilt on each count, etc. Also all the evidence we saw at trial was given to us to look at/watch as much as we needed to in the juror room.

I'll say I guess thats where PA is different - basically everything we saw in the court room (testimony, readings from either side, video) was only able to be given to us once - when it was brought up in the court room. We weren't allowed to really ask any questions afterwards or see the evidence again once we went into deliberations. We were only allowed to take notes basically. They warned us in the beginning to make sure to take vociferous notes bc almost everything had to be based upon memory. Which to me felt like a really bad way of doing things, b/c even your notes are not the same as actually seeing the evidence again.

We tried asking a few questions but the judge was rather vague on a lot of it. Either she reminded us to go off of our memory and that she couldn't read something back or that certain definitions - if they weren't in the instructions given to us - were basically on us to figure out (I believe we tried to find the distinction between carry and possess. There was a definition for one and not the other. She didn't give us a definiton for the other lol

[GeorgiaModerate]

No, because by bringing the case through a proxy they can claim they are not involved, when in fact they are.
And don't play dumb.
Bragg would never have brought the charges if Biden had told him not to.

Why didn't Biden just tell Vance to bring the charges? He passed on this case.

Biden didn't tell anyone to bring any charges.
He just didn't stop anyone from bringing charges.

Either you're very confused or just trolling at this point.

Could be both.  They're not mutually exclusive.

[wbrocks67]

As for the questions, given that they're in relation to Pecker (mostly) and Cohen, seems bad for Trump. I'd imagine they want to confirm the corroboration between the two for sure.

[Ljube]

No, because by bringing the case through a proxy they can claim they are not involved, when in fact they are.
And don't play dumb.
Bragg would never have brought the charges if Biden had told him not to.

Why didn't Biden just tell Vance to bring the charges? He passed on this case.

Biden didn't tell anyone to bring any charges.
He just didn't stop anyone from bringing charges.

Do you think that could possibly be because he has no authority over the state of New York?

He could have advised Bragg against it.
And he allowed the two federal indictments to be brought. He could have stopped those easily.

[Ljube]

As for the questions, given that they're in relation to Pecker (mostly) and Cohen, seems bad for Trump. I'd imagine they want to confirm the corroboration between the two for sure.

Yes.

[emailking]

As for the questions, given that they're in relation to Pecker (mostly) and Cohen, seems bad for Trump. I'd imagine they want to confirm the corroboration between the two for sure.

And they might think they need to because the jury instructions said they're not allowed to convict on Cohen's testimony alone unless they can corroborate it with other evidence. That doesn't mean they need to have this testimony read back to them, but it's possible they're trying to dot the i's here.

[Florida Man for Crime]

A few observations which I think may be significant:


1) At the start of jury selection, the first thing Judge Merchan said was ~"If you can't do this for whatever reason, you may leave now" (paraphrasing the general idea, based on news reports, not an exact quote). This is not usual in jury selection.

This should mean that any potential juror who simply did not want to be there at all was weeded out from the jury from the very start. This does not mean that every juror actively wanted to be on the jury per se. However, this does mean that there are no people on the jury who just do not want (or are not willing) to serve on juries in general, or don't think it is important in some sort of way for citizens to serve on juries. At minimum, every single person on the jury is someone who at least felt it was sufficiently their civic duty to stay and open themselves up to potentially serve on the jury.


2) The implication of this seems to me to be that you are a lot less likely to have people on the jury that simply who simply want it to end and to go home as fast as humanly possible regardless of the substance of the jury deliberations or regardless of the evidence etc. They all at least have some sort of minimal commitment to the idea of jury duty as a thing. So while obviously most people will obviously not want to stay longer than is substantively necessary, at the same time there should be nobody who isn't ok with being there at all and just wants it to end ASAP regardless of what happens.


3) In addition to that filter (requiring at least some basic conscientiousness) through which the jury pool was sifted, there are also 2 lawyers on the jury, which is very unusual (it is rare to have even 1). If there is 1 lawyer on a jury, there is some risk that the lawyer may end up (even if not intentionally) dominating the rest of the jury, which potentially could (in some cases) be an abuse of what the jury process is normally supposed to be. However, since there are 2 of them, each lawyer serves as a "check and balance" on the other. This means that anything either of the individual lawyers says should not carry undo weight just on the basis of their authority, because at minimum the other lawyer serves as a check.

If one lawyer insists on something that they know that the other lawyer may be likely to disagree with, the credibility/authority of the lawyers should decrease with the rest of the jury, because the rest of the jury won't know for sure which of the 2 is right. Both lawyers should realize this, and neither lawyer should want to blow their credibility with the rest of the jury, which means that each lawyer is incentivized not to somehow abuse their professional authority, because they know the other one could call them out on it if they do. In addition, since this case is high profile, neither lawyer can do something improper without fear that the other lawyer might identify themselves afterwards and give an interview to the media describing what the other lawyer abused. And even if the other lawyer who abused remains unidentified as they are supposed to, there are nevertheless a lot of people who saw them in the court room.

Overall, this seems to me like a positive thing for the rule of law/proper procedure etc, because on the one hand the lawyers will naturally tend to do their part to make sure nothing crazy happens and the jury does what it ought to do by the book, but on the other hand you also have a check that heavily disincentivizes any potential abuses by the lawyers.


4) The fact that the jury has already asked several questions relating clearly to the evidence and the testimony, in addition to wanting to hear the jury instructions again, seems to support this analysis. It appears indeed that the jury is a conscientious jury, and they are going through the evidence and the jury instructions with care, and are incentivized to follow them properly. This also has various other implications (i.e. if the deliberation takes a while, that is less likely to mean a hung jury than it would be in a typical case with an average jury).


5) I think you could make a reasonable argument that in an ideal world, all juries ought to be more like this. There would be a selection process weeding out anyone who is not going to take it seriously at all. And also you could maybe have at least potentially having 2 independent/random lawyers involved - though maybe more ideally the lawyers would be sort of "jury assistants" rather than actual voting jurors). Of course, there could be some disadvantages as well, but this has some advantages for the rule of law as compared to a more normal/average jury.