Well this is interesting. Seems Trump’s previous attorney now relegated to second rate PR flack Alina Habba checked the wrong box on a form related to the New York trial, so Trump is getting a bench trial instead of a jury.
With a jury of 12 people, you could still have 1 person decide Trump’s guilt. Say the trial ends and the jury goes to deliberate. 11 people say he’s guilty. 1 guy says Not Guilty and refuses to budge no matter what. That one holdout could decide whether or not Trump is found guilty - even if it’s because the holdout is a hardcore MAGA fan that got onto the jury.
Those jury selection hearings would’ve been entertaining though. With the attorneys trying to quickly sort out who is a maggot and who isn’t and squabbling over it.
Problem is that retrials vastly favor the defendant, because now they have the prosecutors arguments as well as the evidence and it becomes easier to tailor the defense.
“With respect to Trump, an overwhelming majority of the grand jurors recommended that the district attorney seek indictments against him for a litany of offenses related to the call,” wrote Lawfare’s Anna Bower. “Elsewhere in the report, the jurors also recommend charges against Trump in connection to separate communications with Georgia officials and other efforts to overturn the 2020 election. For each of the charges recommended for Trump, one juror—though perhaps not the same juror—voted against the charges.” In all of Trump’s trials with a jury, a single hold-out could stop the former president from being ruled guilty and facing a sentence.
It sounds like one person is already deciding Trump’s guilt (or non-guilt, as it were), so I’d rather it be a judge than some random juror.
It seems far more likely to me that one person refused to charge Trump, than to believe that multiple people thought he was guilty of every charge but one and differed on which that one charge was.
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