Shan Wu

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/GettyThe real sleazy part of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of former President Donald Trump for election interference isn’t what you think.The sleaze factor isn’t the kind of work done by actress and director Stormy Daniels, the business of the National Enquirer, the allegations by model Karen McDougal that she had an affair with Trump, or the fact that celebrity lawyers arrange fees for their clients’ stories.The real sleaze factor is how the media, some legal commentators, and Trump enablers keep describing the case as being about “hush money” and “porn stars”—which is wrong as a matter of legal analysis and troubling in its perpetuation of inequities in our society—and how Trump’s defense lawyers are trying to capitalize on those disparaging characterizations.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/GettyAs his criminal trial gets underway with opening statements and the presentation of the first prosecution witness, defendant Donald Trump’s defense lawyers signaled a “throw everything against the wall and see what sticks” strategy that may reflect a desperate attempt to find something–anything–that may appeal to a lone holdout juror.Indeed, the phrase “you only need one”–or some variation of that–seems to have become mantra among reporters and legal commentators covering the trial. But the scenario of a lone holdout juror causing a “hung jury” and ensuing mistrial is neither the panacea Trump may believe it to be nor as grave a danger that those hoping for a Trump conviction fear it to be.Classically strong defense opening statements usually vary between a near silent approach–sometimes defense counsel even reserve openings until later in the trial if the rules allow for it–in which the defense lawyer simply reminds the jury of the fact that the prosecution has the extremely high burden of proof and to scrutinize the evidence and witnesses carefully and an approach that lays out the theory of defense.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/GettyThere is a simple solution to the student protests at Columbia University and a growing number of other campuses over the Israel-Hamas war: universities should enforce their own student conduct codes and only ask for police help when a crime has been committed.The botched response that saw Columbia simultaneously seeking the arrest of students as well as imposing suspensions and expulsions without going through their normal disciplinary process reflects an abandonment of principles, as well as common sense.The situation started with the pressure applied by loudmouth billionaires like Bill Ackman, whose selective outrage over students expressing their First Amendment rights ignored his own expressions of support for a the vigilante shooter Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed two unarmed people and maimed a third at a 2020 Black Lives Matter protest in Wisconsin.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/GettyIt may turn out that the one thing Donald Trump cannot get away with is sleeping in court.As a young prosecutor, I was part of a legal team on a case presided over by a judge who kept falling asleep during the trial. The judge would often shout for all the lawyers to “Get up here!”—meaning we were to all go up to the bench for a side-bar out of earshot of the jury. There, the judge would berate one or all of us for not performing well.However, sometimes by the time we got there the judge had fallen asleep. The lawyers would stand around awkwardly, while the judge’s clerk stared at us, silently daring one of us to try and awaken the sleeping jurist. Once the judge woke up, he carried on as though nothing had happened and proceeded to berate us. I learned, too, that the judge’s sleeping habits were a well-known secret around the courthouse. A secret which no lawyer or staff spoke about, likely out of fear of getting on the judge’s bad side.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Marco Bello/File Photo/ReutersJudges and prosecutors seem so afraid of violating Donald Trump’s First Amendment rights that they are undermining the integrity of the criminal justice system by seeking and issuing fundamentally flawed gag orders that fail to prohibit attacks on the presiding judges and main prosecutors. For example, in the election interference case brought against Trump by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Judge Juan Merchan issued a gag order preventing Trump from making statements—or directing others to make statements—about witnesses, prosecutors, court staff and their relatives if he intends to interfere with their work on the case as well as any comments about jurors. The order failed to prohibit any comments about D.A. Bragg or Judge Merchan, and Trump immediately exploited this loophole by naming and criticizing Merchan’s adult daughter on Trump’s social media platform Truth Social. Bragg’s office has now sent a letter to the judge asking him to either clarify that his order does encompass his own family and D.A. Bragg’s family, or expand it to cover their families. Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustraiton by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty/ReutersJudge Scott McAfee ruled on Friday morning that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is not disqualified from prosecuting the cases against former President Donald Trump and his co-defendants, but either she and her entire office or special prosecutor Nathan Wade must step down from the case. The decision forced Wade’s resignation Friday afternoon.It also puts Judge McAfee in the same territory as Judge Lance Ito—when it comes to losing control of a high-profile case.Lance Ito, you may recall, was the well-respected Los Angeles state court judge who presided over what was known in the mid-1990s as the “Trial of the Century”—the murder case against O.J. Simpson for the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. Ito allowed the trial to be televised and, in the glare of the publicity, proceeded to melt into a meandering and indecisive jurist who allowed the trial to drag on for almost an entire year before resulting in an acquittal.Read more at The Daily Beast.