A unanimous verdict is required to find someone guilty of a crime. Trump was only guilty in this case if he committed another crime.
First off, you are just wrong on how this works. Trump does not have to commit the crime in order for it to apply because the law makes clear that the only requirement was for him to have had the intent when he committed the falsification of records.
“A person is guilty of falsifying business records in the first degree when he commits the crime of falsifying business records in the second degree, and when his intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.”
intent to commit =/= actually committed
In other words, it’s not Trump’s prior actions that are being adjudicated here, it’s the egregiousness of the falsification itself that takes this to a felony.
I think my house arrest analogy works perfectly here of we tweak it. Imagine I leave my house and walk straight across the street to Walmart where I pull an item off the shelf, rip it out of the packaging and discard the package, shove it down my pants and walk towards the exit. Once there, I see two security guards staring suspiciously at me, get spooked and decide to toss the item and leave.
In that case I didn’t commit a crime, it is only shoplifting if I walked out of the store with it. But my intent was clearly to steal the item and if it turned out that leaving my house with the intent to commit another crime was a felony, a jury on this evidence could very easily convict me.
In this case, the judge allowed jurors to determine what that other crime was without a unanimous verdict.
I don’t think you understand what the charges here were. You keep eluding to the campaign finance violation as if that’s what the jury found was the “intent to commit another crime” as specified by the law. It’s not. The judge laid this out clearly, the law Trump was charged with the intention of violating was NY election law SECTION 17-152 “Conspiracy to promote or prevent election”.
“Any two or more persons who conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means and which conspiracy is acted upon by one or more of the parties thereto, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.”
The problem here is of course that violation of this law requires it to be done by “unlawful means” which means we have to go another layer deep in order to determine whether this law applies. That’s where the campaign finance violation comes in, and the judge allowed the prosecution to include two other possible violations, tax fraud and another that involves the illegal formation of a shell company (which Cohen used to pay off Stormy).
So yes I can see how this is confusing to many and can be considered problematic, but what gets you to what I believe to be an erroneous interpretation of the law is your insistence that the jury has to agree on “what happened”. They don’t, the only thing they have to agree on is whether the elements of the crime that qualify it as a felony were proven. In this case that means they had to agree that Trump
A) falsified his business records, and
B) did so with the intent to influence the election by unlawful means
Provided all twelve jurors agree on (A), it doesn’t matter if they have different reasons for agreeing on (B), the fact still remains that they agree on (B).
This actually reminds me of my time as a juror. We spent 6 days deliberating on a murder trial. In NY the law is that it’s 1st degree murder if it is committed during the course of a robbery. The problem for us to sort out was that we didn’t have the item allegedly stolen, and the murder occurred inside the victims home, but the defendant had never met her before. So this entire thing was a bit odd. What was she even doing there in the first place?
We had many disagreements about what we thought happened, what this was all about, what witnesses were credible, and what evidence was useful. But in the end, all 12 jurors agreed that she did kill her, and that it did take place during the course of a robbery. That’s all that was required so we found her guilty.
If juries were required to agree on all of the details of the story no one would ever be convicted of anything.
I’m not an expert on campaign finance law and don’t claim to be. I would defer to FEC commissioner Smith
Why? Why do you single out one individual who affirms your position and ignore the rest?
The office of general counsel (as in the lawyers) at the FEC determined the contribution to be illegal, Trump’s own DOJ indicted Cohen for it, and even the two republicans who voted not to pursue the issue all but admitted it in their stated reasons for dropping it.
But even if it’s a “technicality”….theres a HUGE difference between not prosecuting someone based on a “technicality” and prosecuting someone on a technicality. One is an exercise in discretion and mercy and one is a gross due process violation. You can’t prosecute someone on a “technicality” dude. I’m stunned you would even say that.
I didn’t say that, I was adopting your logic to show you the problem with it. I wasn’t comparing prosecution via a technicality to prosecutorial discretion to not prosecute. I was comparing your insistence that it is wrong to accept a technicality as a reason to go after Trump while basing your own argument that the justice system is being weaponized… on a legal technicality.
Again, the overwhelming consensus (which includes an actual criminal indictment that Trump’s own lawyer pleaded guilty to) is that this was an illegal contribution. Yet you’re appealing to legal technicalities to argue Trump’s ‘obvious innocence’. Look, we can either debate this through a moral lense or a legal one, but you have to pick.
