Three months ago, Donald Trump took the stand before a jury of nine in a New York courtroom without his typical bombast or ranting. The former president’s complaints about the case and his sparring with the judge took place out of the jury’s sight in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case, and he gave quick, scripted testimony lasting about three minutes.
The following day, however, Trump found a way to protest the trial with the jury’s eyes on him, storming out during the closing argument delivered by Carroll’s lawyer. “The record will reflect that Mr. Trump just rose and walked out of the courtroom,” Judge Lewis Kaplan announced, in case any jurors had missed it.
That same afternoon, the jury returned an $83.3 million verdict against Trump for defaming Carroll — a massive figure that the columnist’s attorneys attribute in part to Trump’s protest.
“I think it hurt him terribly,” Carroll attorney Roberta Kaplan told CNN’s Anderson Cooper at the time of Trump’s stunt. “I mean, our whole case was about the fact that Donald Trump is unable to follow the law, unable to follow the rules. He thinks they don’t apply to him.”
Beginning Monday, Trump will once again sit before a jury in New York, this time with even higher stakes. The jury of 12, along with six alternates, will be chosen from hundreds of New Yorkers after an exhaustive jury selection process that could stretch beyond the first week of the trial.
Choosing a jury will be no easy task when the defendant is a former president who has been at the center of the US political world for nearly 10 years now and a figure in the New York tabloids going back decades.
“The problem for both Donald Trump’s attorneys and the prosecution’s attorneys is they’ve got to figure out how to pick a jury…
Read the full article here
