Legal experts say the former President Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in New York has ‘weaponized’ the justice system for politics.
The unprecedented criminal conviction of former President Trump has opened a dark chapter in the history of America’s criminal justice system, according to several legal experts.
A New York jury on Thursday pronounced Trump guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in what prosecutors called a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election. Trump is now the first former president to ever be convicted of a crime. He is scheduled to be sentenced on July 11 and may be sent to prison.
Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz is among those who have called the facts of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case against Trump an «absolute joke.» He warned on Friday that if Trump can’t get justice in New York through the appeal process, it’ll be open season for Republican prosecutors to target Democrats in deep-red districts.
«This is the beginning of a war of weaponization of the criminal justice system,» Dershowtz said on «Mornings with Maria» on FOX Business. «The legal system failed. Our system of checks and balances, which is the great contribution that the American Constitution made, failed yesterday.»
Trump’s critics would call that dire warning hyperbole, at best, or at worst, dangerous. They argue that Trump’s historic conviction, however irregular the charges, was delivered by a jury of his peers in a court of law where Trump was presumed innocent until proven guilty.
«This was a conviction by a jury of Americans who listened to the evidence and made their decision,» said Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in comments to the New York Times. «When you undermine courts the way that elections have already been undermined, there is no peaceful way to settle differences.»
Trump and many of his supporters say otherwise: That this was the product of a blatantly political prosecution brought by Bragg, a Democrat who campaigned on a pledge to «get Trump,» presided over by Judge Juan Merchan — who previously donated $35 to an anti-Trump political committee — and located in a county where only 12% of residents eligible to be jurors voted for Trump in 2020.
