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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27864 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024

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You can argue anything. Proving intent beyond a reasonable doubt is however a fairly high bar to clear.

Here there was literally zero evidence of intent offered. So clearly not a high bar to a heavily biased jury.

Not when the jury and judge are stacked against you!

The jury went through voir dire, and Trump's lawyers participated in that process. Potential jurors who would not be impartial were struck. This is standard practice.

What a bullshit argument. If you stack a jury group where it is 90-10 against the defendant couple with limited strikes and an adverse judge you won’t get a fair jury.

My question to you is do you think Trump would’ve been found guilty in WV with the same exact facts?

TBH I'm not sure that a second New York jury would get to the same verdict. I think the verdict is correct, but it's clearly the weakest of the cases against him and I was not confident he would be convicted.

But regardless, I think it's disingenuous to describe Manhattan as being 90-10 against Trump in this context. That's true of the voting population, but something like 40% of the people there didn't vote in 2020 (can't be arsed to look up the exact figures). I do not believe that it is particularly challenging to find 12 impartial jurors among a population where somewhere between a third and a half of them voted neither for nor against Trump. Believe it or not, there's a LOT of people who sincerely find politics tremendously uninteresting and are not at all invested in the success of one side or the other.

Bryant and Milam didn't lynch Emmet Till, because a jury found them not guilty.

OJ Simpson didn't kill Nicole Brown, because a jury found him not guilty.

Come on, voir dire isn't some magical process that produces impartial jurors where none exist. Miscarriages of justice and wrongful convictions happen all the time, and falling back on "but the jury was impartial" is either extremely naive, or a refusal to come up with an actual opinion of your own.

I doubt that for one simple reason: I have been on multiple juries. I am not impartial. I was not stricken.

It's very easy. All you have to do is give the right answers.

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