Legal Experts Slam Judge In Trump Hush Money Case Over ‘Outrageous’ Jury Instructions | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: This post appears here courtesy of the The Daily Wire. The author of this post is Ryan Saavedra.

    Legal experts expressed outrage on Wednesday over the instructions Judge Juan Merchan gave to the jury as it began deliberations in former President Donald Trump's hush money case.

    Former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy told Fox News that the instructions were not in "line with the United States Constitution" and had turned into a "make-it-up-as-you-go-along" situation.

    "What's supposed to happen in a criminal trial is a prosecutor has to prove every element of an offense beyond a reasonable doubt," he explained. "So every crime, which is a creature of some statute, has different elements. One is a mental element and then there are the things that you have to do to commit the crime. So like with bank robbery you have to, you know, take money by force from a financial institution and do it intentionally. And those are the things the prosecutor has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. What this judge is telling this jury in this kind of make-it-up-as-you-go-along New York state prosecution of federal law is that when they get to the end of the rainbow and we get to the elements of the offense, the jury doesn't have to be in agreement on what it is exactly that Trump did or what he was trying to commit or conceal when he allegedly falsified his business record."

    "So they're going to give the jury a menu of choices and tell the jury that some of them may believe that this was a criminal objective, some of them may believe something else was, but that they don't have to be unanimous on that," he continued. "I actually think that's pretty outrageous. But in this case, I'm not sure it makes the top ten of outrageous."

    Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University Law School professor, said that the judge "delivered the coup de grace" with his instructions to the jury.

    "He said that there is no need to agree on what occurred," he said. "They can disagree on what the crime was among the three choices. Thus, this means that they could split 4-4-4 and he will still treat them as unanimous."

    "After the federal election violation, Merchan says that the second crime is falsifying other documents," he said. "This creates a redundancy with the NY election violation on the falsifying documents. It allows the government to allege the falsification of documents as a felony and then allows such falsification to be also the unlawful means for certain documents. The third is the violation of tax laws."

    "So a dead misdemeanor for falsifying business records was zapped back into life by alleging that under NY election law 17-152 it was done to influence the election by the unlawful means of falsification of business records," he explained. "It is so circular as to produce vertigo. So the jury finds some documents were falsified to use the unlawful means of falsifying other documents. That is only one of three possible crimes and the jury does not have to agree on which was the basis for their conviction."