Several hundred Manhattan residents were recently sent notices to appear at the borough’s criminal court on April 15. Whether they know it or not, they’re under consideration to be jurors in perhaps the most high-profile criminal trial in U.S. history.
Lawyers for former President Donald Trump and Manhattan prosecutors are poised to scrutinize more than 500 potential jurors when his trial gets underway, according to two sources, a staggering number that reflects the magnitude of the case itself.
The attorneys will review their responses to lengthy questionnaires before interviewing many of them individually in court, with the goal of reaching consensus on who should be selected. It’s an arduous process that’s designed to ferret out prospective jurors who can’t put aside their biases, and it could take days or even weeks.
Ultimately, the group will be whittled down to 12 jurors and a few alternates. They’ll be tasked with deciding whether the former president illegally falsified business records after his attorney paid “hush money” to an adult film star days before the 2016 election. He faces 34 felony counts and has pleaded not guilty.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Lawyers for former President Donald Trump and Manhattan prosecutors are poised to scrutinize more than 500 potential jurors when his trial gets underway, according to two sources, a staggering number that reflects the magnitude of the case itself.
They’ll be tasked with deciding whether the former president illegally falsified business records after his attorney paid “hush money” to an adult film star days before the 2016 election.
“This particular person may be the most famous defendant who has ever lived,” said Levin, now a private attorney who previously represented the daughter-in-law of Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s longtime chief financial officer.
In a case with this much pretrial publicity, the usual challenge of finding enough people willing or able to sit through the trial is thrown out the window, according to Pace University Law School Professor Bennett Gershman.
“What you do now with these jurors is you have a jury consultant, and they’re sitting there with a laptop and they go through all the social media stuff, they Google them and they see who the hell they are,” said Aidala, whose firm also represents former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani in the 2020 election-related case in Georgia.
On March 26, Judge Juan Merchan issued a gag order restricting what Trump and others could say about potential witnesses, court personnel and district attorney staff, as well as their families.
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