After dismissing a seated juror in Donald Trump’s hush money trial, Judge Juan M. Merchan admonished the media for reporting details about the seated and potential jurors that could be used to identify them, ordering them not to report prospective jurors’ answers to questions about their current and former employers.
Quick Read
- Juror Dismissal: Judge Juan M. Merchan dismissed a juror in Donald Trump’s hush money trial who expressed feeling intimidated by press coverage.
- Media Admonishment: The judge admonished the media for reporting details that could potentially identify jurors, citing concerns over their safety and privacy.
- Reporting Restrictions: Reporters were instructed not to publish prospective jurors’ answers regarding their employment or physical descriptions to prevent identification.
- Impact on Jury Process: The dismissal highlights the challenges and pressures faced by jurors in high-profile cases, impacting the jury selection process.
- Reporting Restrictions: The judge in Donald Trump’s hush money trial has issued an order preventing journalists in the courtroom from reporting on prospective jurors’ answers concerning their current and former employers, and these details will also be redacted from court transcripts.
- Jury Selection Developments: Jury selection has faced setbacks, including the dismissal of a juror, an oncology nurse, who doubted her impartiality, reducing the number of selected jurors to six. The panel currently includes a software engineer, an IT professional, a sales professional, an English teacher, and two lawyers.
- Anticipated Trial Proceedings: The judge expects to commence opening statements as early as next week, with twelve more jurors still needed to complete the panel.
- Trial Context: The trial will scrutinize payments made by Trump’s lawyer to Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election, aiming to keep her alleged encounter with Trump out of public discourse. Trump denies the encounter and asserts that the payments were legitimate legal expenses.
- Potential Outcomes: Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, with a possible sentence of up to four years in prison if convicted, although it is uncertain if incarceration would be the chosen penalty. An appeal is likely if there is a conviction.
The Associated Press has the story:
Judge in Trump hush money trial orders journalists not to report on prospective jurors’ jobs
Newslooks- NEW YORK (AP) —
After dismissing a seated juror in Donald Trump’s hush money trial, Judge Juan M. Merchan admonished the media for reporting details about the seated and potential jurors that could be used to identify them, ordering them not to report prospective jurors’ answers to questions about their current and former employers.
“As evidenced by what’s happened already, it’s become a problem,” he said Thursday morning.
He also directed reporters to “abide by common sense” and avoid writing about the physical characteristics of the people called to serve.
“We just lost what probably would have been a very good juror,” the judge continued. “She said she was afraid and intimidated by the press, all the press.”
Jury selection in the hush money trial of Donald Trump entered a pivotal and potentially final stretch Thursday as lawyers look to round out the panel of New Yorkers that will decide the first-ever criminal case against a former president.
The selection process took a step back when one of the seven jurors who had been picked, an oncology nurse, said upon further consideration that she was no longer confident she could be impartial. The juror was then dismissed, leaving six on the panel so far, including a software engineer, an information technology professional, a sales professional, an English teacher and two lawyers.
Twelve more people must still be sworn in, with the judge saying he anticipated opening statements in the landmark case to be given as early as next week.
The seating of the Manhattan jury — whenever it comes — will be a seminal moment in the case, setting the stage for a trial that will place the former president’s legal jeopardy at the heart of the campaign against Democrat Joe Biden and feature potentially unflattering testimony about Trump’s private life in the years before he became president.
The process of picking a jury is a critical phase of any criminal trial but especially so when the defendant is a former president and the presumptive Republican nominee. Prospective jurors have been grilled on their social media posts, personal lives and political views as the lawyers and judge search for biases that would prevent them from being impartial. Inside the court, there’s broad acknowledgment of the futility in trying to find jurors without knowledge of Trump, with a prosecutor this week saying that lawyers were not looking for people who had been “living under a rock for the past eight years.”
To that end, at least some of the jurors selected acknowledged having their own opinions about Trump.
“I find him fascinating and mysterious,” one juror selected for the case, an IT professional, said under questioning. “He walks into a room and he sets people off, one way or the other. I find that really interesting. ‘Really? This one guy could do all of this? Wow.’ That’s what I think.”
The process has moved swifter than expected, prompting Trump when leaving the courthouse on Tuesday to complain to reporters that the judge, Juan Merchan, was “rushing” the trial.
The case centers on a $130,000 payment that Trump’s lawyer and personal fixer, Michael Cohen, made shortly before the 2016 election to porn actor Stormy Daniels to prevent her claims of a sexual encounter with Trump from becoming public in the race’s final days.
Prosecutors say Trump obscured the true nature of the payments in internal records when his company reimbursed Cohen, who pleaded guilty to federal charges in 2018 and is expected to be a star witness for the prosecution.
Trump has denied having a sexual encounter with Daniels, and his lawyers argue the payments to Cohen were legitimate legal expenses.
Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. He could face up to four years in prison if convicted, though it’s not clear that the judge would opt to put him behind bars. Trump would almost certainly appeal any conviction.
The hush money case is one of four criminal prosecutions Trump is confronting as he vies to reclaim the White House, but it’s possible that it will be the sole case to reach trial before November’s presidential election. Appeals and other legal wrangling have caused delays in cases charging Trump with plotting to overturn the 2020 election results and with illegally hoarding classified documents.
