The more time we have to look through Judge Juan Merchan’s byzantine jury instructions in Donald Trump’s “hush money” trial in Manhattan, the worse they look. The vague nature of the instructions has even led to disputes among legal analysts who have struggled to make sense of the case from the beginning. At Townhall, our colleague Matt Vespa has a good rundown of one of the most glaring problems with the instructions. The judge gave the jurors the unheard-of option of picking any one of three crimes that were “concealed” by the entry of “false business records” and said that all twelve of them didn’t necessarily have to agree on which of the three crimes was committed. In other words, he appears to be opening the door to a conviction without a unanimous finding by the jury. Matt warns that we “should be prepared for a conviction.”
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