Category Archives: Courts

Pushed into Buying?

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Hunter Biden’s defense attorneys in his Delaware trial over whether he falsified gun purchasing papers pursuant to purchasing a gun are now claiming that Biden was pushed into buying a lethal weapon.

The defense team also tried to paint gun store employee Gordon Cleveland as a pushy salesman who wanted Hunter to walk out with a firearm that day.
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“A sale is a sale and that was their goal that day,” [lead defense attorney Abbe] Lowell said. “They wanted it done quickly.”

This is so obviously a crock that it seems to me Lowell already is setting up grounds for an incompetent counsel appeal.

Hunter Biden is, and he was at the time, a fully grown, rational human being. He wasn’t even high on drugs at the time he chose to buy the gun, Lowell insists. (That latter business about not being high would seem to be irrelevant, since the presiding judge already has ruled that the prosecution does not need to prove Biden was high at the time of his purchase.)

No one stuck a gun in Biden’s ear and forced him to make the buy. Whether the salesman was a high pressure salesman doesn’t matter. Countless Americans face high pressure salesmen countless times in countless venues, and the vast majority of them aren’t persuaded.

No, Hunter Biden acted on his own initiative to make the purchase. When he crossed the street to enter the gun store in the first place, he already was disposed to buy a gun.

The Trump Conviction

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Manhattan Prosecutor Alvin Bragg campaigned on his explicit promise to get former President Donald Trump (R), not to uphold the law generally. His campaign was to target the man and then find a crime. He did list, though, a broad number of violent crimes that he would not prosecute at all. Now Bragg has gotten his 34 counts of guilty on a case that wouldn’t have been a felony case at all but for his claim that the 34 counts on which Trump was tried were done to cover up another crime.

Here’s what the 6th Amendment to our Constitution says on criminal trials:

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right…to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor….

Here are some tidbits regarding that trial. It’s not an exhaustive list, just a few of the larger, more obvious ones.

Trump’s team was denied by the presiding judge the opportunity to call all of the witnesses they wished to call, including an expert witness who could have explained to the jury the election law that Bragg’s team made a key part of its case. The judge reserved that explanation for himself, and he testified as an expert in the guise of his jury instructions after both sides had rested their cases.

Trump’s team—and Trump himself—were never informed of the nature and cause of the accusation bringing him to trial. At no time did Bragg’s team say what the covered-up crime was, not in the indictment, not in the charge sheet initiating the trial, not at any time during the trial. Not even the jury’s sheet on which they were to mark their Guilty or Not Guilty verdict for each count indicates what that other crime was.

In the judge’s jury instruction, the judge identified three potential covered-up crimes—not the prosecutor, the judge—that the jury could find was the covered up crime that made the 34 actually charged counts crimes of which they could convict Trump. The judge’s instruction further said the jury did not have to be unanimous in its selection of that covered up crime: they could pick and choose among the list, and so long as one juror chose one (or more) from the list, that would be sufficient to convict.

As far back as 1898, the Supreme Court ruled in Thompson v Utah that

a defendant enjoys a “constitutional right to demand that his liberty should not be taken from him except by the joint action of the court and the unanimous verdict of a jury of twelve persons.”

The Court’s 1940 ruling in Andres v United States expanded on that:

Unanimity in jury verdicts is required where the Sixth and Seventh Amendments apply. In criminal cases this requirement of unanimity extends to all issues—character or degree of the crime, guilt and punishment—which are left to the jury.

Trump was denied that unanimity.

But this wasn’t a political hit job. Not at all.

Gerrymandering

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The Supreme Court a few days ago ruled 6-3 that a US House districting map in South Carolina was not an illegal racial gerrymander but was an entirely legitimate political gerrymander and so beyond the reach of courts to intervene in. Political gerrymanders are entirely political matters and the sole province of a State’s legislature, the Court held.

Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent,

This Court has prohibited race-based gerrymanders for a reason. They divide citizens on racial lines to engineer the results of elections.

I suggest that Kagan has, by mistake, hit upon the larger problem that any gerrymandering creates. Political gerrymandering divides citizens on political lines explicitly to engineer the results of elections. How is that any more acceptable?

The idea of barring racial gerrymanders is to prevent the exclusion of racial minorities in a district from electing government representatives who will represent them.

Yet political gerrymanders, which set districts along purely political party lines, are a legitimate means of excluding political minorities, even major parties in a State’s legislative minority, in a district from electing government representatives who will represent those parties’ members.

How is that in any way different from racial gerrymanders? The group that’s in power is allowed, through gerrymandering, to perpetuate its power by permanently reducing the power of those not in power.

Better to draw House districts—or at least US House districts—as rectangles of substantially equal populations, without regard to race or politics.

The first article of the 14th Amendment of our Constitution includes this:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States….

Article I, Section 4, of our Constitution is this:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Place of Chusing Senators.

Congress has some (not absolute) authority over the States’ political decisions regarding the Regulations for holding elections, and that would seem to include districting rules.

Finally, surely among the privileges of an American citizen is the privilege—the right—to vote. Every voter should be on an equal footing with every other voter rather than some voters, by dint of their inclusion in a particular race or political bent, having political advantage over other voters. Disadvantaged voters most assuredly are seeing their voting privilege abridged.

In fine, either all American citizens are equal under law, or we are not.

“Resist the Prosecution but Obey the Court”

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Former Texas District Judge Robert Barton wrote that former President Donald Trump (R) is wrong to ignore the gag orders that the judge in his Manhattan trial had levied against him: there are legal processes by which Trump could seek redress.

Barton is correct as far as he goes.

However, it’s…foolish…to blindly obey—which he is not advocating—and there are other avenues along which to Resist the Prosecution, as the headline has it.

One of those avenues is to challenge the requirement with the immediate action of disobedience, whether statute or judicial order, and force the prosecutor or the judge promptly to defend and enforce the requirement. The challenge thus emphasizes the illegitimacy of the requirement, if such is the case, and gets it modified or tossed. Or the disobeyer sanctioned if he cannot prove that case.

This is the stuff of civil disobedience, and it often proceeds at a faster pace than the stately glacial pace of legal process. Often, too, time is of the essence.

Evidence Tampering

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Some potentially critical call records between Stormy Daniels’ former attorney and Michael Cohen were deleted rather than turned over to former President Donald Trump’s (R) defense team. This was testified to—under oath, mind you—by a paralegal, Jaden Jarmel-Schneider, in the office of Manhattan Attorney General Alvin Bragg, the very prosecutor prosecuting the case against Trump.

When asked about why some of the call records were removed, Jarmel-Schneider said: “My understanding is the decision was always going to be that we would admit the part of the call summaries related to what had come out in trial.”

That doesn’t sound like an accidental, if egregious, screwup. It sounds like deliberate evidence tampering.

That, by itself, should be grounds for dismissal with prejudice of Bragg’s case.