Justice is not arithmetic, but numbers can clarify the outcome of justice. Consider the recent criminal trial of Donald Trump and Hunter Biden: two juries, two unanimous verdicts, and zero “law enforcement.”
Trump has been Claimed He argued that he could not receive a fair trial in New York. The premise of his argument was that any jury would be biased against him because he lost the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections in New York, and that the jurors’ political views would override their duty to render a fair verdict in his favor.
Citizen Trump advocated both selective prosecution and adversarial trials, which to Trump and his supporters were the practice of “loafing” and misusing the legal system to attack political opponents.
Setting aside the argument that politics inevitably corrupt jury deliberations, note that the jury in the New York case was selected with the active participation of both Trump’s lawyers and the prosecutors.
More fundamentally, this argument falls apart under scrutiny. Trump, who lost in New York in 2020, received In Manhattan, where the trial will take place, about 700,000 votes (about 23% of the total) were cast. The jury, which will be randomly selected from registered voters, driver’s license holders, and taxpayers, is highly likely to include Trump supporters. Two or three of the 12 jurors and about four of the total 18 jurors and alternate jurors selected.
Recall that the unanimity requirement meant that a single dissenting juror could have prevented Trump from being convicted. Reports Trump himself believed there was at least one supporter on the jury: in discussions with his team, Trump is said to have spoken about “my juror.”
“The odds are good that Defendant Trump had multiple political allies among the jurors. But in reaching a verdict, no juror concluded that Defendant Trump was not guilty of any of the 34 charges with which he was charged. The jury’s unanimous verdict testifies both to the jurors’ personal sincerity and to the hollowness of Mr. Trump’s protestations that legal contestation dominated the trial.”
Those who argue that no charges should have been filed need to ask themselves why, if the Manhattan case was so fundamentally flawed, the jury concluded that the evidence warranted charges. Famous Jokes The idea that a prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich applies: a grand jury may follow a persuasive prosecutor, but no grand jury can send a defendant to prison or other punishment.
In the Trump New York business records case, system safeguards were in place: The jury was obliged to consider both the prosecution and defense arguments based on much more evidence than the grand jury considered, and on cross-examination of witnesses selected by lawyers for each side.
The implication that so-called “loafers” prevailed does not stand up to scrutiny.
A second case is also worth comparing: the fairness of the American justice system was further vindicated by the Delaware jury that found Hunter Biden guilty of multiple firearms charges. If ever there was a situation where political influence could be expected, this was it: Delaware is home to the Biden family and voted overwhelmingly for Biden in many election campaigns.
If the jury had acted for political reasons, they would undoubtedly have acquitted Biden, but instead they unanimously returned a guilty verdict.
Here we see that the same president who had enough power to give President Gerald Ford pardons to President Richard Nixon refused to intervene when the Justice Department assigned cases to prosecutors appointed by Trump, giving the president free rein to prosecute.
After the jury returned a guilty verdict, Biden Revealed He said he would not pardon his son or commute his sentence. Compare that to Trump, who has repeatedly praised those convicted in the January 6, 2021, riot and promised to pardon his supporters, whom he now calls “warriors,” if re-elected.
And the assertion by some in the Trump campaign that the Hunter Biden case was engineered to give credibility to New York prosecutors is anything but absurd. Sacrifice your son to gain an advantage over a political opponent? Donald Trump might, but Joe Biden doesn’t.
The reactions to these similar yet contrasting lawsuits speak to the depths of our political malaise: the “decline of truth,” as a RAND Corporation scholar put it. It is called Much of the current public debate is fatal to honest government: The argument by Trump and his allies that juries are too political and cannot be trusted to follow the law is, in effect, a demand that jurors’ own political preferences should take precedence.
Many intelligent politicians tarnish their own reputations by seeking the support of dishonorable leaders. To maintain the balance of the constitutional order, the nation as a whole must make reasoned, fact-based judgments. An important step toward that goal is to recognize “loafers” as a myth created to advance the ambitions of one politician. It is a fallacy that taints the American justice system.
Alton Frye has led many bipartisan efforts and written extensively on policy and constitutional issues.
