#jury selection

[remembertheplunge]

Kind of a magical day

4/10/2023

Kind of a magical day, a total “the mysteries plan” type day——Jury duty morphed into a possible 3 week trial experience!, Although—the chances of me being chosen are less than infinitesimal.

3 jurors told profound Criminal Justice System failure stories. Two said that they couldn’t be fair in a trial where police would be witnesses because of their past negative interactions with the police.. The 3rd, her eyes welling with tears,  said “The police killed my brother and my son after a high speed chase in Oakland”.

When the judge asked if she could be fair to both sides as a trial juror, she screamed out “The system’s not working!” 

 I have picked many juries prior to that and had never heard such dramatic  statement’s of hostility towards the police uttered by potential jurors. We potential jurors were asked to return to the jury room. We latter learned that the case settled, probably in part at least to what the 3 potential jurors had said about the police earlier.

First warm day in an ice age, really warm. After leaving jury land, I treadmilled at Valley gym for 36 minutes. On the way home, at the  Palendale and Mc Henery red light, there was a homeless man and his dog. He was flying a sign (asking for help). I gave him $5 and two bottles of sparkling water. As I waited at the light, he drank in the heat. And, as he drank, I healed.

He healed me.

It was the perfect gesture “at”.” At" the callous hardness of the  jury court experience.

 The homeless man , a white maybe 35 year old, was blackend from sleeping out side. It’s been  a brutal cold wet stretch out there—But, today it was warm and he and his dog now had water.

Note:

Re: "the mystery’s plan", above, the Inuit Indians have a saying that there are two plans every day: your plan and the mystery’s plan. 

I had been a trial lawyer for about 40 years before I was called to jury duty in April of 2023. I have been in many jury trials as a criminal defense attorney during those 40 years. Because I was a criminal defense attorney, it was not likely that the District Attorney would leave me on the criminal case in which I was potential juror.

When we are picking a jury, we ask potential jurors questions to attempt to determine if they could be fair given the facts of the trial. I think that jury selection is the hardest part of trial work. It involves a lot of mind reading and guess work.

I have  passed that light at Palendale and McHenery many times on my way home from Trader Joes or the gym. The homeless man and his dog were there on a little island one lane from the curb many times. If I stopped at the light by them, I’d give the homeless man money and or water. He camped in a grassy area 1/4 mile down Mcherey near rthe road. I would see him there as I drove passed at times. 

He may have moved on because I haven’t seen him there for awhile

When I did a lot of work with the homeless in 2017 and 2018, I would say to myself when I handed a bag of food to a homeless person that this gesture was “At” the harshness of society that I had experienced. In other words, instead of retaliating against people who had wronged me , I passed out a bag. I had a healing encounter with the homeless person. In accepting the bag, they healed me. So, my response to hostility, which demanded a response, was a healing gesture, passing out the bags.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Steve Brodner

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

April 18, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

APR 19, 2024

I will not spend the rest of 2024 focusing on Trump and the chaos in the Republican Party, but today it has been impossible to look away.

In Trump’s election interference trial in Manhattan, Judge Juan Merchan this morning dismissed one of the selected jurors after she expressed concern for her anonymity and thus for her safety. All of the reporters in the courtroom have shared so much information about the jurors that they seemed at risk of being identified, but Fox News Channel host Jesse Watters not only ran a video segment about a juror, he suggested she was “concerning.” Trump shared the video on social media.

The juror told the judge that so much information about her had become public that her friends and family had begun to ask her if she was one of the jurors. Legal analyst Joyce White Vance noted jurors’ fear for their safety was a concern normally seen only “in a case involving violent organized crime.”

Nonetheless, by the end of the day, twelve people had been chosen to serve as jurors. Tomorrow the process will continue in order to find six alternate jurors. 

It is a courtesy for the two sides at a trial to share with each other the names of their next witnesses so the other team can prepare for them. Today the prosecution declined to provide the names of their first three witnesses to the defense lawyers out of concern that Trump would broadcast them on social media. “Mr. Trump has been tweeting about the witnesses. We’re not telling them who the witnesses are,” prosecutor Joshua Steinglass said. 

Merchan said he “can’t blame them.” Trump’s defense attorney Todd Blanche offered to "commit to the court and the [prosecution] that President Trump will not [post] about any witness" on social media. "I don't think you can make that representation," Merchan said, in a recognition that Trump cannot be trusted, even by his own lawyers.

An article in the New York Times today confirmed that the trial will give Trump plenty of publicity, but not the kind that he prefers. Lawyer Norman L. Eisen walked through questions about what a prison sentence for Trump could look like.

Trump’s popular image is taking a hit in other ways, as well. Zac Anderson and Erin Mansfield of USA Today reported that Trump is funneling money from his campaign fundraising directly into his businesses. According to a new report filed with the Federal Election Commission, in February and March the campaign wrote checks totaling $411,287 to Mar-a-Lago and in March a check for $62,337 to Trump National Doral Miami.

Experts say it is legal for candidates to pay their own businesses for services used by the campaign so long as they pay fair market value. At the same time, they note that since Trump appears to be desperate for money, “it looks bad.”

Astonishingly, Trump’s trial was not the biggest domestic story today. Republicans in Congress were in chaos as members of the extremist Freedom Caucus worked to derail the national security supplemental bills that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has introduced in place of the Senate bill, although they track that bill closely. 

The House Rules Committee spent the day debating the foreign aid package, which appropriates aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan separately. The Israel bill also contains $9.1 billion in humanitarian aid for Gaza and other countries. A fourth bill focuses on forcing the Chinese owners of TikTok to sell the company, as well as on imposing sanctions on Russia and Iran. 

At stake in the House Rules Committee was Johnson’s plan to allow the House to debate and vote on each measure separately, and then recombine them all into a single measure if they all pass. This would allow extremist Republicans to vote against aid to Ukraine, while still tying the pieces all together to send to the Senate. As Robert Jimison outlined in the New York Times, this complicated plan meant that the Rules Committee vote to allow such a maneuver was crucial to the bill’s passage.

The extremist House Republicans were adamantly opposed to the plan because of their staunch opposition to aid for Ukraine. They wrote in a memo on Wednesday: “This tactic allows Johnson to pass priorities favored by President Biden, the swamp and the Ukraine war machine with a supermajority of House members, leaving conservatives out to dry.”

Extremists Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY) vowed to throw House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) out of the speakership, but Democrats Tom Suozzi of New York and Jared Moskowitz of Florida have said they would vote to keep him in his seat, thereby defanging the attack on his leadership.

So the extremists instead tried to load the measures up with amendments prohibiting funds from being used for abortion, removing humanitarian aid for Gaza, opposing a two-state solution to the Hamas-Israel war, calling for a wall at the southern border of the U.S., defunding the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and so on.

Greene was especially active in opposition to aid to Ukraine. She tried to amend the bill to direct the president to withdraw the U.S. from NATO and demanded that any members of Congress voting for aid to Ukraine be conscripted into the Ukraine army as well as have their salaries taken to offset funding. She wanted to stop funding until Ukraine “turns over all information related to Hunter Biden and Burisma,” and to require Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to resign. More curiously, she suggested amending the Ukraine bill so that funding would require “restrictions on ethnic minorities’, including Hungarians in Transcarpathia, right to use their native languages in schools are lifted.” This language echoes a very specific piece of Russian propaganda.

Finally, Moskowitz proposed “that Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene…should be appointed as Vladimir Putin’s Special Envoy to the United States Congress.” 

Many congress members have left Washington, D.C., since Friday was to be the first day of a planned recess. This meant the partisan majority on the floor fluctuated. Olivia Beavers of Politico reported that that instability made Freedom Caucus members nervous enough to put together a Floor Action Response Team (FART—I am not making this up) to make sure other Republicans didn’t limit the power of the extremists when they were off the floor.

The name of their response team seems likely to be their way to signal their disrespect for the entire Congress. Their fellow Republicans are returning the heat. Today Mike Turner (R-OH) referred to the extremists as the Bully Caucus on MSNBC and said, “We need to get back to professionalism, we need to get back to governing, we need to get back to legislating.” Derrick Van Orden (R-WI) told Juliegrace Brufke of Axios:  "The vast majority of the Republican Party in the House of Representatives...are sick and tired of having people who...constantly blackmail the speaker of the House.”

Another Republican representative, Jake LaTurner of Kansas, announced today he will not run for reelection. He joins more than 20 other Republican representatives heading for the exits.

After all the drama, the House Rules Committee voted 6–3 tonight to advance the foreign aid package to the House floor. Three Republicans voted nay. While it is customary for the opposition party to vote against advancing bills out of the committee, the Democrats broke with tradition and voted in favor.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[beautyinthediss0nance]

My attention span is long gone, and I will possibly be stuck here all day

[kuruksenshi]

The silence in the audience when Greece got points said everything.

[thefailureartist]

Belgium and France just talking french while everyone else has to speak english....

Rage

[william-r-melich]

The One Good Juror for Trump Dismissed & A Man on Fire - 04/20/2024

The one good juror for Trump that I mentioned in my previous post two days ago was dismissed yesterday. As far as this sham trial is concerned, it's not looking good for him. Another juror who was unexpectedly accepted because of her very heavy bias against him. She thought Trump seemed “very selfish and self-serving,” adding, “I don’t really appreciate that from any public servant.” In fact, it seems impossible to find anyone not biased either for or against. Of course, given that this judge (Juan Merchan), like the persecutor Alvin Bragg, suffers from a serious case of TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome), he accepted only those who either dishonestly claimed no bias or admitted a bias against him, which is ridiculous but par for the course. With the one juror gone, it appears that Trump's chances for an acquittal or hung jury is of course somewhere between none to none. In an article from the Epoch Times yesterday, "Trump Demands Trial Judge Remove Gag Order Before Walking Into Court," they said this about the selected jury. "The jury of Manhattanites includes a sales professional, a software engineer, a security engineer, a teacher, a speech therapist, multiple lawyers, an investment banker, and a retired wealth manager." On the one juror who looked favorable to Trump, he said, “We just lost, probably, what probably would have been a very good juror for this case, and the first thing that she said was she was afraid and intimidated by the press, all the press, and everything that had happened.”

On Thursday, District Attorney Alvin Bragg wanted Trump to be found in contempt for violating judge Merchan's ridiculous gag order. Prosecutor Chris Conroy also wanted the judge to find him in contempt for the same reason and asked him to sanction $1,000 for each violation. “The gag order has to come off. People are allowed to speak about me and I have a gag order,” Trump said yesterday.

Just after the final jurors had been selected, a man outside of the courthouse set himself on fire to draw attention to the manifesto he posted online which is a very lengthy description of a conspiracy theory of the rich and powerful taking over the world. He brought a sign with him which read as follows. "Trump is with Biden and they're about to fascist coup us." Not very good grammar. Part of his manifesto said the following. "My name is Max Azzarello, and I'm an investigative researcher who has set himself on fire outside of the Trump trial in Manhattan. This extreme act of protest is to draw attention to an urgent and important discovery: We are victims of a totalitarian con, and our government (along with many other allies) is about to hit us with an apocalyptic fascist world coup. These claims sound like a fantastic conspiracy theory, but they are not." Clearly anyone who would set himself on fire has a seriously bad mental condition. Although I must admit that there are some global elitists who desire world dominance and are making efforts in that direction, such as Charles Schwab who authored the book, "Covid-19 and the Great Reset." However, I'm extremely confident that Donald Trump is not a part of it because he's fighting against those efforts with his America First agenda which intends to make our country stronger and us citizens more free, independent, and prosperous. Apparently, this is the fourth person to set themselves on fire in the last few years, a disturbing trend that hope won't continue.

[gwydionmisha]

Trump Jury Selection Woes | Presidential Hot Dog Eating Contest | Drunk Vultures Rescued

[odinsblog]

In some cases, the people who the prosecutors convicted filed appeals arguing that jury selection was biased and their convictions were overturned — but only after they had spent years behind bars.

The law professors are bringing the complaints, filed Monday with attorney grievance committees and shared first with Gothamist, as a way of finally holding the prosecutors accountable for violations that in some cases date back decades. The group, which calls itself Accountability NY, started submitting complaints against prosecutors accused of misconduct in 2021.

They said the violations are emblematic of a larger problem in the court system: attorneys illegally excluding jurors based on race and other aspects of their identity. Experts said it’s an illegal practice that undermines people's right to a fair trial — especially people of color.

The complaints name prosecutors in five district attorneys’ offices, including Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens. In one 2018 case, a judge found that a prosecutor acted illegally when he struck all the Latino prospective jurors for a Latino man’s trial. In another that same year, a judge ruled that a prosecutor illegally removed the only two non-white people for the trial of an Afghan-American. In one case, a former prosecutor admitted to using notes filled with racist and sexist instructions — including “No Hispanics” and “Stay away from grandmotherly types” — to avoid choosing diverse juries in the 1990s.

“Diversity is an essential safeguard,” said Peter Santina, managing attorney of Civil Rights Corps’ Prosecutorial Accountability Project, which helped to file the complaints. “A representative jury can mean the difference between someone being wrongfully convicted or not.”

When choosing jurors for a criminal trial, prosecutors and defense attorneys in New York are both allowed 10 to 20 peremptory challenges — or chances to dismiss a juror without providing a reason. But they aren’t allowed to dismiss a juror because of their race or religion, and if asked, they have to give a different reason for the dismissal. It’s up to a judge to decide if the reason is legitimate.

The reason for the rule is to prevent attorneys from shaping all-white or majority-white juries, which researchers have found engage in less rigorous deliberations, convict at higher rates and are more likely to sentence someone to death in capital cases.

(continue reading)

[giannic]

Hope everyone had a good weekend. Tomorrow, there will be more drama, more business; the world continues to turn.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Barry Blitt

* * * *

Legal developments in Trump's criminal and civil cases

The Manhattan election interference case—a jury is selected

The prosecutors in Trump's election interference trial in Manhattan expanded their pending motion to hold Trump in contempt to include his reposting of a Fox News attack on jurors who were selected on Tuesday. A hearing on the contempt motion will take place next Tuesday.

The attacks by Fox News—and the re-posting by Donald Trump—appeared to do what Trump's lawyer could not lawfully achieve in the courtroom—remove a juror to whom they objected. By amplifying news media attacks on the juror, Trump caused the juror to rethink her ability to serve on the jury. She was dismissed on Thursday, less than forty-eight hours after she was seated on the jury.

Yesterday, I wrote that Judge Merchan should declare a mistrial each time Trump engages in conduct that intimidates the jury. One reader—Professor Laurence Tribe—was aghast at my suggestion and asked me to rethink my position. Professor Tribe wrote the following (used with his permission):

No! You’re proposing that Judge Merchan give him what he has repeatedly tried unsuccessfully to get: delay and more delay of a trial that only the misinformed regard as small potatoes. The testimony of the head of the National Enquirer alone will be devastating to the myth that Trump won the 2016 election fair and square.

Professor Tribe is right—as proven by Judge Merchan’s ability to continue jury selection at a brisk pace while setting a hearing on the contempt motion for next Tuesday. If Judge Merchan can protect jurors from irremediable harm while ensuring an impartial jury, he should push ahead to the merits. As Professor Tribe notes, the facts are damning and deserve to be heard by the public at the first opportunity. Delays are Trump's objective and should be avoided whenever possible.

But we are left with the conundrum of what to do with a defendant who intentionally disregards a gag order to intimidate jurors. A remedy must exist—otherwise we are faced with an outcome where Trump is above the law. Judge Merchan has been up to the task of controlling Trump. Let’s hope he will continue to do so.

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

[devonellington]

Tues. Oct. 17, 2023: From Poetry Reading to Jury Pool

image courtesy of 12019 via pixabay.com Tuesday, October 17, 2022 Waxing Moon Saturn, Neptune, Chiron, Uranus, Jupiter Retrograde Showery and cool Did you have a great weekend? I hope so. Time for our usual Tuesday morning catch-up. Today’s serial episode is from Legerdemain: Episode 129: Unexpected Negotiations Shelley makes a deal with Mirren to keep the assassin for her…

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"WAR FRAUDS TRIAL HAS 120 WITNESSES," Toronto Star. January 11, 1943. Page 2. ---- Special to The Star Montreal, Jan. 11 - Selecting the jury started today in the trial of Patrick Lynch and three co-defendents on charges of conspiring to defraud the federal government, the public and three firms of $200,000 on war contracts. There are five other related charges.

Other defendants are Lynch's son, Donald, former production manager of the firm; Lynch's nephew, Patrick Noonan, former bookkeeper and Daniel Taugher, former time-keeper. The firms said to have been de- frauded are the Hamilton Bridge Company, the Northern Electric Company, and Horel Industries Limited.

The cases are the first in Canada charging fraud in war contracts. The men were arrested Oct. 24 after months of investigations. Crown authorities said 120 witnesses have been summoned and that the trial probably will last two weeks.

[william-r-melich]

Election Interference - 04/18/2024

Trump would like to be out campaigning, and instead he has been stuck in court all day every day this week for that ridiculous "hush money" court case, for which they have already selected 12 jurors. It usually takes much longer but given that it's nearly impossible for anyone to be completely fair and impartial, especially in Manhattan, NY, the potential jurors dropped very quickly. I don't want to spend much more time on this because the whole thing is ridiculous. Trump came out of the courtroom voicing his some of his frustrations. "I'm supposed to be in New Hampshire. I'm supposed to be in Georgia. I'm supposed to be in North Carolina and South Carolina. I'm supposed to be a hundred different places campaigning. But I'm here all day on a trial that really is a very unfair trial," he said. He held up several copies of news stories that sighted many legal scholars who declared what an unprecedented, unlawful, and immoral trial this is.

He spoke with disgust and anger in his voice as he thumbed through the thick stack of papers he held. "These are all stories over the last few days from legal experts, as is Wall Street Journal editorial. But all of these are stories from legal experts saying how this is not a case and the case is ridiculous, I see another one, the case is ridiculous. Trump indictment. It's missing fraud. There is no fraud." "Justice is on trial. You know, the whole world is watching this New York scandal trial." He called it a spectacle and went on to say, "The whole world is watching this hoax."

Opening statements will be heard on Monday, April 22nd, and gag-order violations will be addressed the following day, ridiculous! From what I read about the selected jurors, there's one that appears to have a good chance of voting not guilty, but I suppose you never know. Of course, it would take only one to make it a hung jury, which would be a big victory for Trump because this is such a bad case that it would more than likely be the end of it. Like I said a couple of days ago, this case should have never been brought. What a joke!

In spite of these sham trials, Trump continues to rise in the polls. It seems like bringing these cases against him makes him more popular. So, this election interference strategy of the left is backfiring so far, good! Trump is amazing. The more he's attacked, the stronger he gets.