Davin News Server

Mike Colangelo wrote:
> Of *course*
AGAIN:


‘One of the Craziest Things’

Constitutional law expert Hans von Spakovsky says the conviction isn’t 
likely to stick, for an array of reasons. Chief among them: Merchan’s 
convoluted jury instructions, in which the Biden campaign-donor judge 
framed the jury’s deliberations in a way that, according to legal expert 
Jonathan Turley, “seemed less like a jury deliberation than a canned 
hunt.” Merchan told the jurors they didn’t have to agree on the three 
possible “unlawful means” prosecutors vaguely alleged Trump had employed 
to “influence” the 2016 election.

“The jurors were told that they could split on what occurred, with four 
jurors accepting each of the three possible crimes in a 4-4-4 split. The 
court would still consider that a unanimous verdict so long as they 
agree that it was in furtherance of some crime,” Turley wrote in the 
Hill before the verdict was handed down.

Accomplice media outlets running interference for Biden and his minions 
— and attempting to influence the 2024 election — collectively wailed 
that conservative news outlets have been misrepresenting Merchan’s jury 
instructions. But there’s no denying the unusual nature of the judge’s 
explanations at the end of a deeply legally flawed trial.

Von Spakovsky said Merchan’s instructions point to reversible error — 
“an error in trial proceedings that affects a party’s rights so 
significantly that it is grounds for reversal if the affected party 
properly objected at trial,” according to the Legal Information Institute.

“This is such a mistake. … If I were the court of appeals, the moment 
this case came in, I would overturn the conviction,” the former Federal 
Election Commission member and Heritage Foundation fellow told me before 
the verdict this week on the Simon Conway Show. “That is one of the 
craziest things I have ever heard and it is a complete violation of 
President Trump’s substantive due process rights.”

Von Spakovsky said the standard in like cases is that jurors come to a 
unanimous agreement on each of the charges they are deliberating. He 
said Merchan added an absurd twist to the proceedings after handicapping 
Trump’s defense throughout the trial.
Threw the Constitution ‘Out the Window’

Defense attorney Randy Zelin told CNN that Merchan’s jury instructions 
contained a “key flaw.”

“Whether you are driving in a Ford or a Ferrari, if someone gives you 
bad directions, you’re going to end up lost. And those jury instructions 
were just a complete, just take the Constitution, throw it out a window, 
burn it, shoot it and hang it,” the attorney said on “CNN Special Report.”

Turley told Fox News that the “trial is a target rich environment for 
appeal,” although he said the appeal will likely “stretch beyond the 
election.”

Von Spakovsky said the courts should act as expeditiously as the Supreme 
Court did in the Colorado ballot access case in which it unanimously 
overturned the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling kicking Trump off the 
state presidential primary ballot.

As for Merchan, von Spakovsky said the judge is either one of the most 
incompetent judges he has ever seen or his curious instructions to the 
jury was “a sign of intentional misfeasance.”

https://thefederalist.com/2024/05/31/intentional-misfeasance-makes-show-trial-conviction-ripe-for-reversal-legal-experts-say/