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Trump’s conviction in New York extends losing streak with jurors to 0-42 in recent cases
When 12 Manhattan jurors returned after a day and a half of deliberations on May 30 and convicted Donald Trump of 34 felonies, they added to an astonishing losing streak for the former president.
Trump and his company have been unable to win over a single juror, out of 42 total, in recent criminal and civil trials.
“It’s a very remarkable thing. In all these jurors, he didn’t succeed in getting one, not one person,” said criminal defense attorney Robert McWhirter.
The juries — two in state criminal trials and two in federal civil trials — have unanimously and quickly ruled against Trump. Winning over just one juror is often the baseline hope for defense attorneys, because a jury that can’t reach consensus — known as a hung jury — results in a mistrial. One juror can save a defendant from defeat, at least in the short term.
The Trump juries
DAVID DEE DELGADO / Getty Images
In December 2022, 12 jurors found two Trump Organization companies guilty of 17 felonies related to tax evasion. A prosecutor in that trial referred to Trump, who was not charged in the case, as the “elephant not in the room,” and it landed Trump’s former chief financial officer behind bars. Jurors learned that executives at Trump’s company had received ill-gotten perks, and “grossed up” the benefits to avoid tax hits.
Five months later, nine jurors took just a few hours to find Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll. The jurors awarded Carroll $5 million.
Trump blamed his lawyers, saying they advised him to stay away from court. He said he believed his presence and testimony would’ve led to a better outcome.
He first tested that theory in January, attending a second trial stemming from different allegations that he defamed Carroll. He even briefly testified. The nine-person jury in that case awarded Carroll another $83.3 million.
While in criminal cases juries have to find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, the two Carroll trials were civil cases. Trump was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll by a preponderance of the evidence, a lower standard.
Trump decided not to testify at his New York criminal trial, although had no choice but to attend every minute of it.
“These are your peers”
Trump and his attorneys have long argued they can’t get a fair shake in Manhattan, where President Biden won about 85% of the vote in 2020. Before the trial, they sought a change of venue to other nearby counties. His two civil trials over the Carrolls allegations included jurors from many of those counties, which are more politically diverse and often vote to send Republicans to Congress.
“I’m sure there are people on those juries who voted for him, just by a statistical probability. There had to have been a certain percentage who actually voted for Donald Trump, and yet he could not succeed in getting one of them to go his way,” said McWhirter.
Trump might argue that the politics of New York tilted the odds against him, but defendants “can’t pick and choose” where their case will be tried, said Matthew Mangino, the former district attorney in Lawrence County, Pennsylvania.
“You commit a crime in Manhattan, these are your peers. And they’re going to be selected out of that population of people,” said Mangino. “The crime’s in Manhattan, the jury’s in Manhattan and you’re going to be tried in Manhattan.”
While arguments about which jurisdiction might favor one political candidate or another in his criminal case are common pundit fare, research into juror behavior suggests that civilians take the job very seriously once they become jurors.
Valerie Hans, a professor at Cornell Law School and one of the nation’s leading scholars on the jury system, said jurors typically follow the evidence and tend to reach consensus based on what they’re presented.
“Most of the research says when you have substantial evidence favoring guilt, or supporting acquittal, the verdict follows the evidence,” Hans said.
The evidence against Trump and his company in his most recent case was voluminous: handwritten notes relating to a scheme to cover up reimbursements for a “hush money” payment to an adult film star. A recording of Trump talking about a related payment in the scheme, that one made to a model. Corroborative testimony from multiple people indicating Trump understood the details of the scheme and signed off on it, with the goal of keeping information from voters.
Still, the fact that Trump is one of the most famous and powerful people on Earth meant the court had to take concerns about preconceived biases very seriously, Hans said.
Hans said jury selection was “super careful.” Justice Juan Merchan excused people as soon as they indicated they couldn’t be impartial.
“Huge numbers of people said they couldn’t be fair to Trump, and they were booted off without more discussion,” Hans said, adding that Merchan then allowed lawyers “more latitude than is typical” when questioning those who remained.
Across the country, prosecutors win the vast majority of their trials. That’s one of the reasons most cases end in pretrial agreements in which defendants enter guilty pleas. In civil cases, the odds aren’t nearly as bad for a defendant.
A 2019 survey of research into federal lawsuit outcomes published in the University of California Davis Law Review showed that just 30% of plaintiffs won their civil court cases in 2017. The study showed that plaintiffs’ victories had generally declined over time since 1985, when they won 70% of their cases. It noted that some of that decline had to do with an increase in lawsuits against the government — generally, a tough battle to win — but that they could find “no complete explanation for the win rate decline given the available data.”
Judgments in federal civil trials still need to be unanimous. Across the four trials, Trump’s lawyers called just six total witnesses. They opted instead, in all of the cases, to focus on cross-examining prosecutors’ and plaintiffs’ witnesses, in an effort to cast doubt on the cases against Trump.
It didn’t work.
“As many defense lawyers have probably found out, it’s risky to rely on a ‘I’ll just get one juror and they can hang the jury’ strategy,” Hans said. “It is quite difficult to manage that, especially if you have absolutely no support.”
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A long-running heat wave that has already shattered previous records across the U.S. persisted on Sunday, baking parts of the West with dangerous temperatures that caused the death of a motorcyclist in Death Valley and held the East in its hot and humid grip.
An excessive heat warning — the National Weather Service’s highest alert — was in effect for about 36 million people, or about 10% of the population, said NWS meteorologist Bryan Jackson. Dozens of locations in the West and Pacific Northwest tied or broke previous heat records.
Many areas in Northern California surpassed 110 degrees, with the city of Redding topping out at a record 119. Phoenix set a new daily record Sunday for the warmest low temperature: it never got below 92 F.
A high temperature of 128 F was recorded Saturday and Sunday at Death Valley National Park in eastern California, where a visitor died Saturday from heat exposure and another person was hospitalized, officials said.
ETIENNE LAURENT/AFP via Getty Images
The two visitors were part of a group of six motorcyclists riding through the Badwater Basin area amid scorching weather, the park said in a statement.
The person who died was not identified. The other motorcyclist was transported to a Las Vegas hospital for “severe heat illness,” the statement said. Due to the high temperatures, emergency medical helicopters were unable to respond, as the aircraft cannot generally fly safely over 120 F, officials said.
The other four members of the party were treated at the scene.
“While this is a very exciting time to experience potential world record-setting temperatures in Death Valley, we encourage visitors to choose their activities carefully, avoiding prolonged periods of time outside of an air-conditioned vehicle or building when temperatures are this high,” said park Superintendent Mike Reynolds.
Officials warned that heat illness and injury are cumulative and can build over the course of a day or days.
“Besides not being able to cool down while riding due to high ambient air temperatures, experiencing Death Valley by motorcycle when it is this hot is further challenged by the necessary heavy safety gear worn to reduce injuries during an accident,” the park statement said.
ETIENNE LAURENT/AFP via Getty Images
The soaring temperatures didn’t faze Chris Kinsel, a Death Valley visitor who said it was “like Christmas day for me” to be there on a record-breaking day. Kinsel said he and his wife typically come to the park during the winter, when it’s still plenty warm — but that’s nothing compared with being at one of the hottest places on Earth in July.
“Death Valley during the summer has always been a bucket list thing for me. For most of my life, I’ve wanted to come out here in summertime,” said Kinsel, who was visiting Death Valley’s Badwater Basin area from Las Vegas.
Kinsel said he planned to go to the park’s visitor center to have his photo taken next to the digital sign displaying the current temperature.
Across the desert in Nevada, Natasha Ivory took four of her eight children to a water park in Mount Charleston, outside Las Vegas, which on Sunday set a record high of 120 F.
“They’re having a ball,” Ivory told Fox5 Vegas said. “I’m going to get wet too. It’s too hot not to.”
Jill Workman Anderson also was at Mount Charleston, taking her dog for a short hike and enjoying the view.
“We can look out and see the desert,” she said. “It was also 30 degrees cooler than northwest Las Vegas, where we live.”
ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images
Triple-digit temperatures were common across Oregon, where several records were toppled — including in Salem, where on Sunday it hit 103 F, topping the 99 F mark set in 1960. On the more humid East Coast, temperatures above 100 degrees were widespread, though no excessive heat advisories were in effect for Sunday.
“Drink plenty of fluids, stay in an air-conditioned room, stay out of the sun, and check up on relatives and neighbors,” read a weather service advisory for the Baltimore area. “Young children and pets should never be left unattended in vehicles under any circumstances.”
Rare heat advisories were extended even into higher elevations including around Lake Tahoe, on the border of California and Nevada, with the weather service in Reno, Nevada, warning of “major heat risk impacts, even in the mountains.”
“How hot are we talking? Well, high temperatures across (western Nevada and northeastern California) won’t get below 100 degrees until next weekend,” the service posted online. “And unfortunately, there won’t be much relief overnight either.”
More extreme highs are in the near forecast, including possibly 130 F around midweek at Furnace Creek, California, in Death Valley. The hottest temperature ever officially recorded on Earth was 134 F in July 1913 in Death Valley, though some experts dispute that measurement and say the real record was 130 F, recorded there in July 2021.
Tracy Housley, a native of Manchester, England, said she decided to drive from her hotel in Las Vegas to Death Valley after hearing on the radio that temperatures could approach record levels.
“We just thought, let’s be there for that,” Housley said Sunday. “Let’s go for the experience.”
In Arizona’s Maricopa County, which encompasses Phoenix, there have been at least 13 confirmed heat-related deaths this year, along with more than 160 other deaths suspected of being related to heat that are still under investigation, according to a recent report.
That does not include the death of a 10-year-old boy last week in Phoenix who suffered a “heat-related medical event” while hiking with family at South Mountain Park and Preserve, according to police.
In California, crews worked in sweltering conditions to battle a series of wildfires across the state.
In Santa Barbara County, northwest of Los Angeles, the growing Lake Fire had scorched more than 25 square miles of dry grass, brush and timber after breaking out Friday. There was no containment by Sunday. The blaze was burning through mostly uninhabited wildland, but some rural homes were under evacuation orders.
