Justice Merchan gets even sleazier

By Monica Showalter

New York State Justice Juan Merchan, who is presiding over New York prosecutor Alvin Bragg's trial of President Trump over a bookkeeping issue is getting sleazier now that Bragg's case is starting to fall apart, giving the Red Queen of the Alice In Wonderland story a run for her money.

At issue now are his instructions to the 12-person jury as it goes into deliberations, telling them that they don't need to agree about what the supposed 'underlying' crime of Donald Trump was that would make his hush money payment to porn "star" Stormy Daniels a felony, which is the legal basis for turning the bookkeeping issue into a 34-count felony. They just need to think that Trump was thinking about commiting a crime when he signed off on the check and what that crime was can be anyone's guess.

But no matter: Sentence first, verdict later.

And he started this out with a doozy of bad behavior, going all Eddie Haskell on the jury to begin, as if in a bid to butter them up to do things in his biased way. Normally, juries are praised after they render their verdicts by judges.

But Merchan is special.

 

 

Merchan instructed them to come up with any underlying crime they liked, and to be helpful, offered them a three-course smorgasbord of possibilities, though I am sure he wouldn't be bothered if one of them got creative and came up with a different one of his own.

 

According to legal analyst Andy McCarthy, this is problematic:

 

"Outrageous. In a normal criminal case every statutory crime has what we call elements of the offense. Like in a bank robbery case you have to rob – it has to be a financial institution, you have to show intent," said former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy. "Those are the things the jury has to agree on unanimously that they were proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Here what we’re doing is taking the element that actually makes this a felony, because remember falsification of records is normally a misdemeanor in New York. What makes it a felony is that you are concealing or committing another crime." "And here the judge is telling them they don’t have to agree about what the other crime is under circumstances where that not only is what makes this a felony, makes it a four-year potential prison penalty rather than a year or less, but it is also what gets us into the courtroom." "If this had been a misdemeanor, the time to bring this case would have lapsed in 2019. The only reason they are still able to bring this case is because it’s a felony allegedly and yet now the judge is saying you know, you don’t have to agree on what the felony is."

Trump, of course, was never told which of the underlying crimes he supposedly committed in the courtroom, so he was not able to defend himself from them, which according to some legal observers violates the equal protection clause.

His instructions actually were illegal, based on a recent Supreme Court case in an opinion written by left-leaning Justice Stephen Breyer that right-leaning Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas concurred with, regarding the critical need for unanimity regarding an underlying crime:

 

 

Yet he seemed to know that he gave illegal instructions because he insisted that no written instructions be given to the jury. That way, his hands would be clean when the jury attempted to explain its logic and the judicial regulators started looking in askance at his jughead grasp of the law. Who, me, give bad instructions? They must have heard me wrong.

Not surprisingly, the jury found this confusing. They sent a note asking him to repeat those instructions:

 

 

Even CNN's analyst found it skeevy:

 

 

They've been at it for four hours now. I hope they ask him to repeat those instructions every hour on the hour and hoist him on his own petard.

There are other irregularities that inexorably make this case look like they are trying to rig it, such as, why'd this guy get picked at all to be the judge here:

 

 

Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York is on the job on this, too:

 

 

All of this comes on top of Merchan's other bad acts, such as gag orders, which are normally issued to protect defendants, not prosecutors; a refusal to allow President Trump to use an 'advice of council' defense after he was badly advised by former fixer Michael Cohen; and suppression of President Trump's most important witnesses, such as former FEC chief Brian Smith from testifying that they never prosecuted for these kinds of claimed "crimes."

 

 

And this:

 

 

Now he's sending the jury home, apparently after concluding that they aren't going to convict him the way he would like. That way, he can buy some time to figure out a new way of working them over:

 

 

It's disgusting. This is a classic kangaroo court that is a disgrace to the entire United States. That guy doesn't belong on any judicial bench, anywhere, ever.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/05/justice_merchan_gets_even_sleazier.html