Trump Needs a Will Smith-Style Gag Order (Minus the Slap)
Despite a feeling of one step forward and two steps back Thursday morning, the jury in the Manhattan District Attorney’s election interference case against Donald Trump is now complete, with only the selection of five alternates left to be done.
Some legal experts had predicted that jury selection could take weeks but my own view was that the experience of Judge Juan Merchan, as well as the prosecutors in the case, would likely make the process a quick one.
In part, that is due to the fact that state courts in large cities are far more adept at handling jury selection in high profile cases than the federal courts with their more rarified atmosphere. But Merchan’s approach did cause some unforced errors which may repeat themselves and grow worse if not corrected.
The two steps back snag was caused by the removal of two jurors after they had already been selected, which meant that the judge initially was satisfied that there was no reason to remove them and neither the prosecution nor defense had felt strongly enough about them to exercise any of their precious ten peremptory strikes against them.
But the first juror reported to the court in the morning that she felt that enough identifiers had been reported that she felt she would be unable to be fair and unbiased.
The second juror had been summoned back to the court because the prosecution had apparently found information........
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