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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   38673 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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I didn't think they would be stupid enough to try and make him an obviously innocent "convicted felon", yet here we are. The black vote is going to explode with the court shenanigans and the shooting.

He is for sure not innocent. You can certainly argue that it was a politically motivated prosecution of the 10 felonies a day type but Trump really did commit a crime.

AFAIK they didn't even show evidence that Trump was the person who categorized the expense.

Let alone the necessity that the mis-categorization had to be "in furtherance of another crime," and that crime remained unspecified, untried, and jurors instructed that they could meet this requirement with anything.

What crime? That he put "Legal Expenses" when he should have put "Settlement Payment" in his own ledger? That's a "crime" on the level of putting the wrong category in Quicken.

He’s correct it is a crime.

But every white color worker who has to document their work probably commits it every other day.

Putting the wrong category in quicken is a crime. Telling your co-worker she’s beautiful when she’s bummed a date went bad is a crime.

Telling your co-worker she’s beautiful when she’s bummed a date went bad is a crime.

Technically it isn't. Allowing one co-worker to tell another that she's beautiful when she's bummed a date went bad is a tort on the part of the employer, but sexual harrassment laws are not criminal laws, and are not directly enforceable against non-manager employees.

Normally I wouldn't get this technical, but given that a large part of the "the NY prosecution is a stretch" is based on the distinction between different kinds of illegality, I think we should.

I think it turns into a crime if you make it a business record. If you say it on Skype where it is recorded then it’s part of the business record. If it’s a lie then it’s falsified. I don’t think in the statute it says it needs to be relevant to operations. But it would be a falsified record about the business. You described an employee who is ugly as beautiful which is false.

There is a requirement that it wasn’t intended to defraud. So false is not enough.

I think you can stretch fraud statutes enough to cover that.

It would also need to be a false statement of fact. Statements of opinion can't be legally false. And beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If "is female beauty a fact or an opinion" gets to SCOTUS, "opinion" wins 9-0, or 8-1 with Thomas dissenting if a "fact" ruling would help a Republican.

And you have to have “intent to defraud.” I’m not sure legal expense is false but Im very sure there was no intent to defraud.

Why do you say he’s “obviously innocent” when the jury unanimously found him guilty after being explained all the evidence? It sounds like you think “they” can simply control what the jury believes.

  • -10

It sounds like you think “they” can simply control what the jury believes.

The thing is, Trump's so polarising that you'd expect most people to vote on the jury based on their opinion of Trump, rather than the facts of the case. And, well, Manhattan voted 90% Democrat in 2020, and ten peremptory strikes for each side easily suffice for an all-Democrat jury (even strikes for each side advantage whoever has a majority, because striking a minority juror will usually succeed at replacing the juror with one of the majority while striking a majority juror will usually just replace the juror with another one of the majority - this is the same way the South could ensure all-white juries until Batson declared race-based peremptory strikes to be unconstitutional).

Manhattan turnout was 65%. That means your jury pool is not 90% (actually 85%) Democrat-voting, it's 55%.

  • -11

(actually 85%)

Sorry, the map I read had like five different shades of blue for different margins and Manhattan's pretty small.

The people who don't vote for President are unlikely to show up for jury duty also. And they're still Democrats.

  1. The jury pool hates Trump.

  2. No they didn’t get to hear “all the evidence.” The judge made many poor rulings allowing things in that should not have been permitted and prohibiting evidence that should’ve been allowed.

  3. The judge’s instructions were faulty as a matter of law. That is, he gave the wrong law to the jury. Even a truly impartial jury (of which this was not) would probably convict based upon the faulty leading jury instructions.

  4. The law Trump allegedly broke was impermissibly brought by the DA (ie even if all of the elements were proven NY under its own constitution and under federal preemption could not bring the case).

Huh, is there somewhere I could read about 2 - 4 explained in greater detail? I’m afraid I’m not well versed in legal proceedings.

I believe the former federal elections commissioner wanted to testify saying it was not a crime. I don’t know rules of evidence that well but that sounds like a guy very qualified to explain the evidence.

The relevant rule of evidence here is that the judge is responsible for determining what the law is and instructing the jury accordingly. The parties can bring witnesses to testify about the facts of the case but they can't bring witnesses to make arguments to the jury about what the law is.

If the judge gets the law wrong, that's an appealable error.

The prosecution actually asserted it was a fact that there was a campaign finance violation. In addition, the judge permitted Michael fucking Cohen to testify about his understanding of FECA. So yes you are correct abstractly but wrong as it was applied in this case.

Once the judge allowed Cohen to say what he said the only effective curative would’ve been to allow Smith to testify or declare a mistrial.

The parties can bring witnesses to testify about the facts of the case but they can't bring witnesses to make arguments to the jury about what the law is.

This is a distinction without a difference when the facts of the case hinge on what the law is in actual application, which thus shapes the facts of what intent should be on the part of the accused, which the witness forbidden to testify was the best able to speak to.

Googling this to refresh my memory. Turns out the judge didn’t bar the former FEC guy from testifying. The judged barred him from giving expert opinion on the law.

I guess for rules of evidence it’s probably legally correct. There is a bigger problem here because when cases get more complex judges become less of the expert on the law.

The felony case is a lot like the judge telling the jury that eating a ham sandwich is murder. And then they showed a picture of Trump eating a ham sandwich.

But again the problem is he allowed Cohen to testify as to what Cohen understood the law to be. So basically the judge spoke out of both sides of his mouth.

And then banning the chief enforcer of Don't Eat Ham Sandwiches from attesting that what was being presented as a ham sandwich was actually a ham taco, and would not be considered a ham sandwich by the Ministry of Don't Eat Ham Sandwiches.

The judge's rulings on a point of law are binding unless appealed. That you can't put up a legal expert to explain to the jury why the judge is wrong on the law is Courtroom Procedure 101. In a better legal system, this point probably should have been resolved on an interlocutory appeal before trial, but in the US system as it exists that wouldn't have helped because the appeal would have gone to a NY State appeals court, and what is actually needed is a Federal ruling on a difficult technical point of Federal law.

The US system (going right back to the Constitution making federal trial courts optional and the Federalist Papers explaining that federal law could be enforced in State courts) assumes that state courts can be trusted to get federal law right. The ways a federal court can overrule a State court on a point of federal law are deliberately restricted.

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