Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz provided some insights into the final jury selected for former President Donald Trump’s ‘hush money’ trial in Manhattan, and he wasn’t too encouraging.
OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author’s own views.
Dershowitz told Newsmax on Friday that he thinks Trump got “a bad jury” in his criminal trial in New York.
In New York City on Friday, a jury of 12 members and six alternate jurors was selected for the criminal trial involving Trump’s alleged efforts to conceal hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
“This is a bad jury for Donald Trump,” Dershowitz said on “Newsline.” “I think it’s too much of a New York Times, TikTok jury. … This is maybe the best you can do with a New York jury pool, but it’s not a good jury for Donald Trump.”
Dershowitz predicted that “the best he’s likely to do is a hung jury” and said that while “it’s possible” that the jurors could vote to acquit Trump, he “can’t imagine” they will.
Dershowitz also weighed in on the judge’s ruling regarding the prosecutors’ obligations to disclose the identities of their initial three witnesses.
Reportedly, when asked by Trump’s attorney, Todd Blanche, about their planned first three witnesses, Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass declined to disclose their identities. He cited Trump’s disparaging remarks about witnesses and others involved in the case on social media as the reason for not revealing the information.
Judge Juan Merchan said in response to the decision, “I can’t fault them for that,” according to Newsweek.
Dershowitz said that the judge’s ruling was “not fair.”
“You have a right to prepare, and if I were Trump’s lawyers as soon as the name of the first question is going forward, I would call for a recess” and request multiple days to prepare questions for cross-examination.
“You can’t just call witnesses out of the blue and expect that you’d be ready for cross-examination or objections,” Dershowitz said.
He also called the gag order imposed on Trump “outrageously unfair,” adding that “criticizing is part of the essence of our First Amendment and it should apply to anybody who’s playing a role” in the trial.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and the Democrats who are supporting his case against Trump just got a huge wake-up call in the form of a damning new survey.
According to a new poll by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, the first criminal trial former President Donald Trump faced was the one in which Americans are least convinced he committed a crime.
Just one-third of U.S. adults believe that Trump committed an illegal act in the New York City criminal trial, where he faces charges of falsifying business records to silence a former adult film star regarding an alleged extramarital affair just before the 2016 election.
Meanwhile, nearly half of respondents believe that Trump engaged in illegal activity in the other three pending criminal cases against him. Furthermore, there is considerable skepticism regarding whether Trump is receiving fair treatment from the prosecutors in the case, as well as doubts about the impartiality of the judge and jurors in matters involving him.