Hacker News Reader

Comment by djha-skin | Hacker News Reader

To play devil's advocate a little bit. From a structural perspective, it was pretty much impossible for the courts to recruit any jury that wouldn't be biased. Furthermore, the case was in New York, which is a very democratic city. I would be surprised if any jury picked from there wasn't biased and wouldn't have convicted him of any crime the judge put in front of them.

To be perfectly clear, I am not a fan of Donald Trump, and personally think he is likely guilty. I'm just commenting on a specific aspect of the case that I find interesting.

View on HN

The defense gets to voir dire the jury. There were still millions of votes for Trump in NY and many that didn't vote at all.

A fair point.

I don't think this is the case for grand juries...

Which is why they don't have the final say; the verdict is made by the trial jury after hearing from both sides.

Yeah that's pretty much the point I was trying to make. A lot of people seem to be getting confused about the process difference between a grand jury and the jury in a trial.

> To be perfectly clear, I am not a fan of Donald Trump, and personally think he is likely guilty. I'm just commenting on a specific aspect of the case that I find interesting.

Why is it necessary to state this? I find these kind of statements very interesting. They tell us a lot about unspoken rules, societal taboos, Overton windows etc etc

Everyone assumes there's a 2nd degree hidden intention. "You would only defend Trump on anything if you were a huge fan of his!"

Exactly

The charges aren't even published and people like the commenter replied to are saying he's guilty. Literally QED of the entire event (and the total lack of self awareness, 2nd+3rd order consequences) in and of itself.

"Everyone in my home town knows and hates me" is one hell of an argument.

To be fair Trump has always played into the rich villain character with the media even in the 1990s… well before his formal entry to politics in the 2000s when the media realized they had a wall-to-wall supervillain story on their hands.

But before he was president he was uncontroversially pretty popular in NYC. Even when playing the villain to the local gov/media. It’s difficult or impossible to disconnect this reality from national perceptions well beyond NYC. He was a president of the United States after all. He’s not just a local. That changes the stakes 1000x fold.

Are you calling NYC a "hometown"?

He was born in NYC and lived there until college. I think either of which would make it safe to call his "hometown", unless something specific about NYC (its size?) precludes people from calling it a hometown.

Every New Yorker hates pretty much every mayor that they've ever had, despite electing them to be mayor.

Sure, but you can apply this same logic to any other possible decision maker. There are no unbiased juries, judges, political leaders, or anyone else.

Someone still has to make a descision.

In general, I'd say there is huge bias in favor of Trump though. People respect authority and fame to a shocking degree.

While it would certainly be difficult or impossible to find a jury of people who’ve never heard of Trump, I think it’s easy for us online news-followers to underestimate the number of people who don’t really follow news or politics. Sure Trump was a controversial president, but so was Obama and Bush and Clinton and etc - if you only follow the vague shape of the news and not the specifics.

In the very democratic city you cite, 3.2 million people voted for Trump to Biden’s 5.2. I’m sure the defense can find a handful of supporters among that population they’re content with.

Martin Shkreli also attempted this defense.

The Donald was very popular with the blue collar in NYC back in the day.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com