HAROLD HUTCHISON
Noted attorney Alan Dershowitz said on Thursday that he doubts a New York appellate court will overturn former President Donald Trump’s conviction in his Manhattan trial.
A Manhattan jury of five women and seven men convicted Trump on 34 counts of falsification of business records Thursday after nearly 12 hours of deliberations. Dershowitz said he predicted the conviction multiple times, including in his book, “Get Trump,” before saying that he believes appellate judges will be reluctant to overturn the jury’s decision because they might be biased against the former president.
“This is a very sad day for American justice. I have now added one banana to my usual banana republic: A grouping, umm, we’re up to seven or eight at this point- and it’s a worse day for America than it actually is for Donald Trump,” Dershowitz said. “Don’t know what the impact will be on Trump. Don’t know what it’ll be on his electoral prospects, he’s probably not going to get jail time, and if he does, it would be stayed pending appeal.”
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“I don’t know whether the case will be reversed on appeal. I don’t think it would be reversed by the appellate division,” Dershowitz continued. “These are judges who are terrified of being perceived of as helping Trump in any way. Don’t know whether or not the New York Court of Appeals in Albany will have the ability to not consider the impact it will have on individuals as judges. Surely the Supreme Court wouldn’t, but that’s a way off and there wouldn’t be a decision by the Supreme Court, probably before the election.”
New York Judge Juan Merchan was accused of having a bias against Trump during his handling of the case. Merchan donated $15 to Biden’s presidential campaign in 2020 and made two $10 donations to Democratic groups via ActBlue, one to a “Stop Republicans” group and another to a “Progressive Turnout Project,” according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) records.
Merchan’s daughter, Loren, worked for a firm that helped Democrats raise $93 million off the former president’s indictment in the business records case, the New York Post reported in March. Dershowitz compared the jury’s verdict to those made in the deep South before the Civil Rights movement.
“This is still the weakest case I’ve ever seen in 60 years. The fact that the jury convicted based on false instructions, wrong instructions, based on the jurors having been between 85 and 90 percent picked from a veneer that hates Trump and doesn’t want him to be president, the fact that the jury convicted doesn’t make this case any stronger or any better,” Dershowitz said. “I was recently just 15 minutes ago on with The Times of London and they were saying, ‘Well, doesn’t the fact that the jury convicted prove it was a strong case?’ No, no! It proves that it was of a case that was brought in a jurisdiction where a conviction was almost assuredly guaranteed.”
“In the South, when they convicted black people improperly with an all-white jury or acquitted white people improperly with an all-white jury, that didn’t mean that those convictions were correct. It just meant that the jury didn’t reflect the values of our, of our country, it reflected the values of a particular region of the country, in this case the region is a liberal region, New York, in the Southern cases, the region was the conservative region of the South,” Dershowitz continued.
“Juries are imperfect and juries represent the biases of individuals,” Dershowitz added. “We do live in the age of Trump syndrome, people can’t talk rationally about Donald Trump any more than they can talk rationally about Israel or about some other subjects.”
Featured image credit: Screenshot/Rumble/The Dershow
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