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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   28031 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024

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To be clear, the motion in limine never asked the court to preclude all testimony relating to Cohen's guilty plea. It only asked to prohibited the prosecution from arguing that it was evidence of a violation. The defense even made it clear in their motion that they intended to ask Cohen about his convictions on cross. The defense never claimed the limiting instruction was insufficient. I don't see anything here for an appellate court to work with.

As for your second argument, I wasn't trying to argue that this is a strict liability crime! I was simply trying tease out the general principle that "intent" isn't necessarily as specific as some seemed to think it was , partially due to confusion between the FECA requirements and the requirements of the law Trump is actually being prosecuted for. I'm not going to reproduce the jury instructions here, but they go in at some length about what constitutes intent for the purpose of the New York statue. Bringing up cases from a different jurisdiction that involve a different standard don't do much to bolster arguments about intent requirements in this case. In any event, I can't find anything in the pleadings to suggest that the Defense ever raised this issue or had any problem with the jury instructions that were ultimately given.

I think the ultimate problem here is that the jury came to a conclusion some people disagree with. You don't think Trump had the requisite intent? That's fine, but the jury heard the evidence presented and came to a different conclusion. It's okay to disagree, but thinking the jury got it wrong isn't grounds for an appeal.

I mean, I've quoted -- in this very thread, just a couple comments up! -- those same jury instructions. It's not like the FECA part is better, and both the jury instructions and trial transcript point out the fine details of the terms for that, either.

I think I've made it very clear that I'm arguing about the law, not the jury's determinations on facts. I get that you're trying to juggle a lot of conversations, here, but just repeatedly asserting that the question of intent papers over any questions of what the law does or can prohibit this way isn't very compelling or engaging well with my claims.

I apologize for any confusion I may have caused, but I'm not exactly sure what you're arguing here. The court laid out the necessary intent standard in the jury instructions. If you think that instruction was incorrect, you need to tell me what the court should have said. I'd look myself but I don't happen to have a copy of the New York jury instruction manual in my office. If that standard is appropriate then whether the prosecution met it is a factual issue, not a legal one.

I've been pretty explicit about my problems with the scienter requirements revolving around what the jury was instructed to find, not whether they found it:

"Yes, if the jury were adequately instructed."

Trivially, FECA requires "willful" violations: the jury instructions contain no definition for 'willful' at all, and discussions in the courtroom with the jury present were minimal. This has overturned convictions for far more egregious conduct on very similar textual lines before (or see this, where the 'ignorance' of the law itself bordered on the intentional if not schizophrenic).

Conspiracy (as in election law 17-152) itself is likewise complex: some jurisdictions do recognize ignorance of the law as a defense in some cases. See Massachusetts (requiring that for an offense that is "malum prohibitum only", "both must have had knowledge of the existence of the law and knowledge of its actual or intended violation") or federal law (where "we have such substantial difficulty in understanding how Alston can be convicted of a conspiracy to defraud by structuring when he cannot be guilty of a conspiracy to structure or of structuring itself" by reason of ignorance of the law for a 'willful' violation statute, or see a case where supplemental jury instructions repeating that everyone should be treated as knowing the law were error). New York state's caselaw on the matter is (somewhat surprisingly) underdeveloped, at least from a quick search, but it's not showing anything on the level of California (which has a bunch of bookies regulation cases, generally favoring conspiracy prosecutions with ignorance of the regulation), either.

The prosecution does not need to prove the underlying offenses, or even that they occurred, yes. But neither can courts duck the question of whether the underlying offenses could actually be criminal, as a matter of law, simply by informing that the immediate offense requires merely that someone intended to do something illegal.

Thanks. I understand what you're getting at but this falls more into the category of bad defense strategy than anything that's going to get overturned on appeal. The defense argued for the inclusion of the "willfully" language in the jury instructions and the court granted their request. If they felt the need to define willfully then they could have made that argument, but they didn't. I agree that the explanation of FECA was insufficient considering how complicated the law is, but my impression is that both sides were trying to keep things as simple as possible for the jury to avoid confusion. Unless Trump plans on mounting a quixotic ineffective assistance of counsel defense, I doubt this will be an effective line of appeal. In the case you cited the problem wasn't that they didn't define a term but that they materially misstated the men's rea requirement.

Do you have a copy of the defense's proposed draft for jury instructions? Because I've not found them anywhere online, and I'm really not sure where you're so certain that they did not argue in favor it of anywhere. The defense didn't even get their request that the "willful" requirement be copied from FECA to the state election law conspiracy (from 4392, page 98 here).

See here. The highlighted sections are the defense's proposed additions to the instructions.

That looks like it's just the discussion on FECA, and it doesn't even include all of the stuff that was openly discussed during the trial transcript, where the judge quoted proposed draft from the defense with the words:

"Thus, a person acts with intent of conduct constituting a crime be performed, when the person acts willfully that a conscious objective or purpose that such conduct be performed."

And the defense highlighted :

And so, our position is that that needs to be imported up into the 17-152 mens rea. That is, the mental state required to join the conspiracy.

Our cite, this is in Footnote 25 of our request to charge, People versus Caban, C -A -B -A -N , New York Court of Appeals, 2005. This is an individual who is prosecuted for conspiracy and necessarily is an individual that must have the prescribed mens rea, the requisite intent to join others and commit a substantive crime.

The PDF I posted was only the specific section dealing with the FECA violations. There is one of these for each section of the jury instructions, and posting all of them would be a bitch on mobile.

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