Voir dire lord: Trump trial selects ‘impartial’ jury
Though the Founding Fathers were divided over whether a president should be able to face criminal prosecution — James Madison famously proposed explicating presidential immunities at the Constitutional Convention, his colleagues demurred — the Sixth Amendment proves they all agreed that all potential defendants, plebeians and presidents alike, deserve the right to “an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.”
From the outset, Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of Donald Trump was an overtly political perversion of the law as written, with the Manhattan district attorney contorting local records falsification charges into federal campaign violations and stretching the statute of limitations on said charges at random. But it’s during the criminal trial jury selection that the real impediments to granting the former president a fair trial have emerged.
By design, any president is likely too famous to find a single jury who can enter a court of justice truly blind, but especially a president (and before that, a celebrity) as famous as Trump is too polarizing to expect potential jurors — especially in New York City, which voted for Joe Biden in 2020 by a 53.5 margin — not to have an opinion about the man. Peer into the biographies of those people so far selected to fill the jury, and that promise of impartiality goes poof.
Already, the judge has kicked out Juror 2, a nurse who said she got her news from CNN, for a Hell’s Kitchen financier who is online enough to follow both Trump fixer-turned-foe Michael Cohen and Trump whisperer Kellyanne Conway on social media. When asked about Trump, Juror 11, a theater-loving paralegal, said she doesn’t “like his persona” or “how he presents himself in public.” Juror 5, a teacher, gets her news from Chinese Communist Party platform TikTok. Jurors 1, 3, 6, 7, and 10 all reported getting their news from the New York Times. If you can possibly believe it, when Juror 4 was asked if he had any strong feelings about Trump, he — an engineer from the Upper West Side — said, “No, not really.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
While reading the Gray Lady doesn’t mean by default that a juror cannot impartially judge Trump, it certainly indicates that there’s a high probability a juror does not like him. And which jurors are more concerning? Those terminally online enough that they confess they regularly read TruthSocial, or jurors like the seventh, a civil litigator who claims he doesn’t “have opinions about [Trump] personally”?
In the social media era, coalescing a jury pool capable of remaining untainted throughout a trial seems damn near impossible without total sequestration. Prosecute the president who has been a household name for 30 years? And perhaps Bragg is pushing Trump’s Sixth Amendment protections to their very limits.
