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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 twelve people agree that X and Y murdered Z and W, but they cannot by any means come to agree on whether X murdered Z and Y murdered W or converse, should they convict?
(Claude Opus says no, GPT-4 says yes.)
Isn't this kind of situation the whole justification for 'felony murder' provisions? Like if two people beat another guy to death but you can't prove who landed the killing blow, they both go down for felony murder anyways.
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I would say so, sounds like a group of 2 people murdered another group of 2 and the details are being debated.
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I think it's okay to say "if you charge someone with 34 crimes it's not because they committed 34 crimes"
Anyone remember that young black guy who leapt on the old lady judge and went to town on her before they pulled him off? He got charged with fucking everything, almost the definition of having the book thrown at him. Expulsion of bodily fluids toward a government official is one I remember in particular because he happened to let some spit out of his mouth while he whaled on her for a few seconds.
Now, there are few people on the planet earth that are more against young black criminals whaling on old ladies than me. But the fact he was charged with 57 crimes instead of 1 felony assault charge for the assault he actually committed is a gross and obvious miscarriage of justice. It's absurd. It's banana republic shit to charge a guy with 57 felonies for jumping on an old lady and hitting her for a few seconds before being pulled off.
Oh, absolutely. I'm sort of a law anarchist at this point--the text of the law matters very little. Judges and lawyers have proved over and over again their willingness to creatively interpret laws to get whatever outcome they want, without consequences. Why should honest judges voluntarily limit themselves and abide by rules which other judges routinely ignore?
Trump legitimately did commit those crimes as far as I can tell. If he didn't, New York certainly has the power to write new laws which he is guilty of. To what extent must Trump abide by the legitimate rule of law of one state?
So far as I know, there is no law which prevents any state from writing a law intended to jail a presidential candidate. However, everyone recognizes this would be a terrible thing to do, so doubtless the supreme court would step in and fabricate some legal reasoning interpreting such a law as unconstitutional. It's harder to do so when, as in this case, the state does have a pretty good legal pretext to justify its legal decisions, and it's not extremely clear to everyone that the law was meant specifically to target one person.
We ceased to be a country of law a long time ago.
Legislative lawfare is prohibited (or at least made difficult) by Article I, Section 9, Clause 3 of the US Constitution: “No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.”
Very easy to circumvent. Just pass a very broad law and only prosecute political enemies (perhaps along with a host of other undesirables).
Which, again, I'm sure would be ruled unconstitutional somehow, but not in any principled way.
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Action starts at about 30 second mark
Homeboy was like a flying squirrel, should've sent his ass to the paratroopers instead of prison
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No, because they can't say what the crime was. We don't convict people on "vibes", or at least we aren't supposed to.
In the worst case, you could have 8 people, a majority, thinking that he was innocent of the modifier. This should nullify it.
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Not really. If 4 say he did X and only 4, then there is reasonable doubt he did X since 8 disagree. Same with Y and Z.
All 12 in this scenario agree that "Trump falsified business records in pursuit of a crime" though. I agree that if they disagree on what the crime was, that should be reasonable doubt, but legally I don't think it is reasonable doubt.
How far down the rabbit hole should they have to go for it to be the "same" crime? What if there are two separate alleged incidents that both fall under the same legal citation? Is that the same crime? Should that count? If half of the jury thinks that crime X happened on Monday, and the other half thinks that crime X happened on Thursday, should that count?
I totally agree, which is why I think the relevant factor is whether he's indicted for the crime. My point is that the choice between 3 options is just one failure mode of the law. The worse failure mode is that generally people can be punished for crimes without those crimes ever being prosecuted in court.
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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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