Alvin Bragg wanted to stack the deck against Donald Trump in his criminal trial.
Democrats needed a guaranteed guilty verdict if Joe Biden has any chance for victory in the fall.
And Donald Trump scored a key win over Alvin Bragg that will have you jumping for joy.
Two jurors removed in Trump case
Bragg and Trump’s lawyers settled on 12 jurors and six alternates in his sham political persecution.
But jury selection didn’t wrap up without some twists and turns along the way.
On the second day of jury selection, juror number 2 asked to be removed from the case.
She told Biden campaign donor Judge Juan Merchan that she didn’t think she could be fair and impartial after the media reported biographical details about her, which led to friends and family bombarding her.
“Yesterday, alone, I had friends, colleagues, and family push things to my phone regarding questioning my identity as a juror,” she told the Judge. “I don’t believe, at this point, that I can be fair and unbiased and let the outside influences not affect my thinking in the courtroom.”
Judge Merchan eventually excused the juror.
A second juror got the boot when prosecutors questioned his truthfulness on answers about his past.
“Juror number four, dismissed Thursday afternoon, was excused after prosecutors said they found a news article showing that someone with the same name as his juror had previously ‘been arrested in Westchester for tearing down political advertisements”’ Axios reported.
Bragg and his team likely worried that allowing this juror to remain would open up an avenue for Trump lawyer’s to secure a mistrial if the juror withheld information that could prove them biased.
Legal experts believe this is good news for Donald Trump
Booting these two jurors could work in Trump’s favor.
Jury consultant Carolyn Koch told CNN that the publicity surrounding the case and the possibility of the public figuring out who’s on the jury could cause other jurors to not want to convict Trump.
“What’s happened with juror number two, if others start to get wind of that, I think people are going to start to get the jitters,” Koch stated. “And if I’m on the defense side of it, that’s going to make me extremely happy, because any unraveling of this is in my best interest.”
Koch added that the jurors are usually better vetted in a high-profile case like this.
“In my experience, in cases that were high-profile involving political issues or serious crimes and questionnaires were being used, they were written questionnaires that the lawyers got in advance, and so both sides weren’t scrambling in open court with lots of people there trying to, on the spot, figure things out,” Koch added. “They had time in advance to really scour the landscape to make sure that on the day of jury selection, people are properly vetted. So you‘re not going to have surprises like that.”
But there has never been a trial like this.
Bragg’s goal from the start was to secure a rigged jury of Trump haters pulled from the over 80 percent of voters in New York who voted for Joe Biden.
Bragg, however, may have suffered a setback on that front.
