The Impeachment of President Donald J. Trump

It's not as if Stone wouldn't have appealed his conviction anyway. There's a whole lotta details about the trial we don't know unless we've read the transcripts of things like the jury selection process, etc.

Presumably, the judge in the case will make the right call. We'll just have to see what she does. But even if there was incontrovertible evidence (such that even you would admit Stone was guilty), no one who is at all familiar with Roger Stone would expect him to say, "It's a fair cop" and just go to jail. He'll fight it no matter how absurd he might look doing it, because that's the kind of guy he is.

#2 alone will usually get you voir dired out. It's really shocking how bad a job the defense lawyers did on that. I can also see #4 being a problem; Stone is explicitly a Republican political operative, and could theoretically have been involved in the campaign against them, or they might have been unable to give an opposing political operative a fair hearing. But yeah, #5 is the clincher on a mistrial.

I seem to recall that in some high profile cases prospective jurors may be asked to fill out a questionnaire to save time. I would guess that such a questionnaire would include boilerplate voir dire questions like profession, age....hard to believe she would even make it even to void dire as a "cause" rejection. Definitely sounds like piss poor lawyering.

Uh it's just as much the duty of fucking defense counsel to weed out biased jurors. Sounds like a malpractice suit if anything.

Link?

Was that really a surprise? If it was you are pretty gullible and should do more research.

Noting someone had a moment of clarity for the obvious is not thinking highly of him. Nice try, but that spin is easily countered with my cunning troll fu.

Wow, that's awful! You'd think there would be some more checks on the system, like eleven more jurors and a requirement for unanimous assent.

I think the conviction should probably be overturned. Stone is guilty as hell, but he deserved an impartial jury.

We don't know exactly what happened that this juror got on the jury. We don't know if the judge stopped any real digging into the background. We don't know if the juror lied to the court. It's possible.

We don't know if the prosecutors and the judge knew about the jurors full extent.

We do know the judge was hostile to Stone throughout the trial and refused to let his defense strike people from the jury who might harbor anti-Trump thoughts.

And yes it's entirely possible Stone's attorneys were incompetent. I said as much a few posts back.

https://dailycaller.com/2019/11/05/roger-stone-judge-anti-trump-juror/

The judge overseeing the trial of Roger Stone rejected a request from the Trump confidant’s defense lawyers Tuesday to remove a potential juror whose husband works on the Justice Department unit involved in the Russia investigation and who admitted to having negative views of President Donald Trump, according to reports.

At the beginning of jury selection, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson, an Obama appointee, said that she would not remove potential jurors solely on the basis that they work for the federal government or because of their views of Trump.


That position was tested at the very start of jury selection at Stone’s trial, which recessed early after the longtime political operative fell ill.

The potential juror served as a press secretary in the Office of Management and Budget during the Obama administration, according to Politico and Reuters. She also admitted to having a negative view of Trump. (RELATED: Roger Stone’s Trial Begins Tuesday)

The potential juror’s husband also currently works in the Justice Department’s national security division, which was involved in the investigation of the Trump campaign and other Trump associates, including Stone.

.....

The juror they sought to strike from the pool acknowledged following developments in the special counsel’s investigation. But Jackson said that she accepted the potential juror’s claim that she did not have an opinion of the Stone case.
​

The foreman was a lawyer and an activist.

Nothing wrong with that but don't you think such a person could sway people to a particular decision regardless of the actual facts of the case?

Especially if those other jurors, all Democrats BTW, are already inclined to not like Trump or those around him?

This person should have never been allowed on the jury even if the only thing they knew about her was that she was a lawyer.

Another juror writes an op-ed even though there is a gag order from the judge.

Stone hasn't even been sentenced yet and the jurors are going public.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...97ac-a7ccc8dd1ebc_story.html#comments-wrapper

"I’m a 51-year-old white man from New England. My favorite person on the jury was an African American woman from Tennessee." (the Foreman is from Tennessee)

I have no problem with Roger Stone being guilty. Guy's a moron.

I do have a problem holding a trial in a town that is so blue in favor of Democrats that while you might have diversity of race, sex, and gender on the jury you will not have it in regards to politics. I also have a problem with the DOJ prosecutors apparently telling the DOJ higher ups one thing and than asking for 7-9 years in front of the court.

I also now have a problem that if the government is going to say multiple times that Andy McCabe lied under oath but isn't charged that it's a two tier justice system when you turn around and charge Roger Stone.

It's not unheard of for convicts to get sentenced to less than nine years for rape or manslaughter, to put this sentencing into perspective. Make of that what you will!

Is there any evidence that any of the other jurors were biased?

Is there any evidence that, objectively speaking, the evidence presented would have led to a verdict of not guilty?

Stone's actions mid-trial nearly led the judge to holding him in contempt. It sounds more to me that his attorney deliberately allowed a biased juror on the the jury to sabotage the inevitable verdict.

They were democrats...dontcha see? dontcha SEEEEE?

Why is any of that relevant?

1. It was defense counsel's job to question that juror and determine whether or not they would make a good juror.

2. Defense counsel's failure to accomplish #1 speaks to either the attorney's incompetence worthy of a malpractice suit, or a deliberate tactic to sabotage the verdict.

3. Stone was wantonly agnostic to the judge and her orders throughout the trial and should have been held in contempt at least once.

3. You are insane and/or trolling.

4. Die in hurricane.

What difference does it make? Seriously, I don't know. Does finding out a juror (let alone the foreman) had it in for the accused before the case even started usually result in overturning a guilty verdict? Does it matter if the defense attorney should have kept her off the jury but failed to do so?

At worst, it seems like a really good cause for appealing the conviction.

In How to Argue and Win Every Time Gerry Spence recounts the time he was defending a sheriff who'd been accused of murder. This sheriff had recently been profiled on 60 Minutes as your typical corrupt sheriff as well as the subject of numerous negative news pieces. When Spence asked the sheriff which of the potential jurors he might want, the sheriff replied, "Let's pick the ones who say they think I'm guilty. At least we know they're honest." Spence won the case.

Is your point that jurors should be biased against the accused?

No, my point is that even if the jury is biased against you, it is still possible to win the case.

But it's still not supposed to be biased against you. Every single juror is supposed to be impartial. That's like the cornerstone of our judicial system. I'm not saying the jury didn't come to the right decision in spite of the fact that he probably didn't get a fair trial. I'm saying he probably didn't get a fair trial...and if that's the case, his conviction should be overturned.

Just want to start off this post by saying I really respect you and your opinion. I don't want to come across as a dick, because I recognize you give a lot of thought to your posts. I also want to say I'm open to having my mind changed, especially here where I have mostly made my mind up on Roger Stone. And I genuinely enjoy your posts.

But honestly, there were several other jurors present who took a lot more convincing. Not to mention a seasoned judge.

It would take a huge fuckup to have all of the jurors be biased.

Assuming for the sake of argument that only one of the jurors was biased does not negatively impact anything.

My brother in law was the foreman of a jury involved in a DUI case, and he had his own prejudices. He very strongly pushed for a conviction, but was outvoted and ultimately acquiesced to vote not guilty despite mathematically impossible odds.

That is anecdotal, but is illustrative of the overwhelming trend of juries.

I know firsthand that there is an entire art to picking the best jury on both sides.

You can't convince me that an intelligent, albeit prejudiced, jury foreman is going to carry enough sway to convince a handful of knuckle-dragging mouthbreathers who weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty.

The majority of the evidence code is based on the premise that jurors are fucking retards (pardon the language).

It would take an overwhelming amount of evidence to convince your average juror with an IQ of 80 to vote a certain way.

Any decision to allow a biased juror on the case was unequivocally deliberate. To say otherwise would be admitting that defense counsel committed malpractice.

Edit to add: It is a very high standard to overcome juror deliberations. It would take something akin to outside influence or outright bribery.

Impartiality is a bit of a myth, however. No matter how good a person is, they're still going to be swayed by unconscious biases. If I knew nothing about Roger Stone (and I didn't until about 2015 or so) and I was on the jury, when I saw this view of him:



I would have been reminded of this:


That second image is from the 1932 film Freaks.

While I'd like to think that I could be objective on the subject, the truth of the matter is that having seen the film and knowing that Schlitzie was intellectually challenged, I might have thought the same of Stone. Would I then think that he was some kind of hapless idiot, deserving of sympathy because he didn't know what he was doing? I don't know. I might instead think that this was proof that Republicans are all idiots and deserve to be clubbed like baby harp seals. Someone else might decide that based on the color of his skin, the size of his bank account, or the fact that Stone was a Republican he was either guilty or innocent. They might not even realize that such superficial details are coloring their perceptions of Stone, regardless of if they they thought he was guilty or not.

Our judicial system, for the most part, is based off of the British system, which isn't perfect. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't think that the folks who designed either system were deliberately trying to come up with a fucked up system, just that because humans are fucked up, any system we develop is going to be fucked up. The best that we can do is to try to minimize how fucked up things are, and to recognize that no matter how hard we try, we're not going to get things right 100% of the time. There is a great podcast about how our unconscious biases can cause us to do the wrong thing called You Are Not So Smart. The guy who does it has also published a book on the subject.

I'm sure we can both think of a couple of posters here (or ex-posters) who wouldn't care what the evidence was showing that a person was innocent, they'd still vote to convict based on nothing more than the fact that the person being accused had been arrested for the crime. Said posters would provide all kinds of rationalizations for their decisions, no matter what the exculpatory evidence presented was, while claiming that they were being "objective."

Neither of us know, since we weren't there, and even if we were, our unconscious biases might have prejudiced us to one outcome or the other, regardless of the evidence being presented.

The best that any of us can hope for in a court case is an approximation of justice. Did Stone get that? Tough to say, but he certainly could afford better lawyers than you or I. This is one of the reasons why I'm opposed to the death penalty. You can be innocent, have good lawyers, but still be convicted of a crime you didn't commit simply because of some superficial detail that even the jurors didn't realize was coloring their opinion of you.

Okay, it's obvious I haven't expressed myself very well. You and @Fisherman's Worf seem to think that I believe the jury came to the wrong conclusion. That this woman subverted the jury to finding Stone guilty when the evidence said he was innocent. I'm not saying that. I think Stone was almost certainly guilty as hell. I think the Jury made the right decision. Stone should have been found guilty.

What I'm saying is that the correct judgement that the jury came to is tainted by a single juror who was biased against Stone and shouldn't have been on the jury to begin with, and for that reason alone, the conviction should, and probably will IMHO be overturned. If she was biased against Stone, then he didn't get a fair trial.

Link

Nope.

Didn't say you did.

Possible, but without knowing all the evidence, we can't be certain of that. All we can do is hope that the judicial system works and that eventually the truth will out.

And what I'm saying is that no trial should really be considered "fair." In a best-case scenario, the jury will try to be fair, but even then they will be handicapped by their unconscious biases.

That's nice, but again, an impartial jury is impossible. Period. Paragraph. How do you define "improperly influenced"? A skilled lawyer could argue that because you've posted on the same board that Dinner has, you're more inclined to consider an illegal immigrant to be innocent since you don't want to be lumped into the same category as a fuckstick like Dinner. Would that lawyer be wrong? Maybe. The only way to know is to have a version of yourself who has had the exact same experiences as you, save for the fact that you never encountered Dinner online. Not exactly possible.

No, I understand what verdict you believe was right. That's why I'm trying to be patient with my understanding of your reasoning, and my explanation of what key details I think you are overlooking. And I appreciate your framing of this.

While I appreciate your case law citation, it's important to point out that it is from the California Supreme Court, which has no precedential influence on the Roger Stone case. My understanding is that Stone was indicted in the US District Court for the District of Columbia. They could give two fucks what the California Supreme Court has to say on the issue of juror bias.

Nevertheless, assuming the DC District Court gave a fuck about the California Supreme Court (especially a case arising from mine, @Shirogayne, and @His Grace Faceman the Duke of Wordforge's hometown )
Holloway is taken out of context, and I believe you are reading too much into the phrase "improper influence. "

Improper influence in regards to Holloway had to do with a juror continuing to read news articles about the accused after the juror was sequestered, which therefore led to juror misconduct. And juror misconduct is a very high standard to prove. Courts are incredibly reluctant to intrude upon the deliberations of juries.

My understanding is that here, there is no indication of the type of misconduct as in Holloway.

While it's certainly worthy of pause that the foreman was publicly critical of Stone, that was before the trial. And defense counsel had ample opportunity to investigate that and reject her as a juror well in advance. It was not a hidden fact. Defense counsel's failure to do that speaks solely to their incompetence as a trial lawyer, and not to juror misconduct. Or else, defense counsel's failure to do that speaks to a willful omission intended to eventually discredit the inevitable verdict. With an administration built on gaslighting, which are you more inclined to believe?

Admittedly, I haven't been keeping up with the minute by minute reports, so please correct me if I'm wrong about anyone on the jury being tainted by contemporaneous news reports as in Holloway. But as far as I'm aware, the only accusation of bias has to do with her public statements about Stone and/or Trump before she was a juror, correct?

You have shitty reading comprehension, or English comprehension. But, go ahead, why don't you tell us how your train of thought got from "long since lost" and "same" to "that [was] a surprise"?