Replies to post #450766 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[zab]

You really do live in your world of make believe, now try that in court and here the laughter begin. You continue to keep losing your moment with each post. Once again, this is court, your client is another step closer to being found guilty and you going to use that as a defense. As a defense attorney you just cannot say anything, it has to be on point. I know the prosecution never brought it up, so once again, you are putting trump on the stand, under oath, and he will be cross examined. Waiting for the laughter to die down. Trump cannot even keep a story straight for longer than an hour. Trump has given depositions, those were sad affairs, he lost those cases too. But once again thanks for playing Trump in court.

[blackhawks]

Change of venue, my ass. A stupid, frivolous request. Smith proved his professionalism by NOT moving the venue from FL for the docs case, leaving it in the hands of a provably incompetent Trump appointed judge.

Lack of strong evidence of intent doesn’t necessarily amount to a get-out-of-jail-free card, and a jury might still convict Trump if the jurors are convinced that he clearly engaged in criminal conduct.

So far in the Jan. 6 prosecutions of rioters, judges and jurors have shown little sympathy for defendants who claim to have been acting in good faith, or for the perceived good of the country.

In one recent case involving a man who repeatedly declared during trial that he still believed the election was stolen, a federal judge ruled that it was irrelevant whether that belief was sincere if he knew he was using illegal means to disrupt congressional certification of the vote.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/08/02/trump-jan-6-indictment-jack-smith/

[arizona1]

If Jack was not worried about his case, and wanted to silence the bias critics, he would prove it by agreeing to a change of venue

Okay, let's hold it in NY where he's really from, agreed?

[fuagf]

Jack Smith picking Florida over D.C. likely didn’t turn on Supreme Court case

"...And unless Jack can prove he is a mind reader, his evidence is worthless, everywhere but D.C. If Jack was not worried about his case, and
wanted to silence the bias critics, he would prove it by agreeing to a change of venue. Fat chance of that. He knows he has a lock in D.C."

Crap. You people are flailing for excuses like Trump does in any normal course, of any matter.

The justices issued an opinion about the otherwise obscure topic of venue. But don't assume the case factored into the special counsel's thinking.

June 16, 2023, 7:18 AM AEST

By Jordan Rubin

The Supreme Court on Thursday decided a case .. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/21-1576_e29g.pdf .. about venue, meaning the place where a crime is charged. The decision would have escaped widespread notice if its emergence didn’t coincide with Donald Trump’s federal indictment .. https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house/deadline-legal-blog/annotated-trump-indictment-document-pdf-classified-mar-a-lago-rcna88886 , in which special counsel Jack Smith chose to charge the former president in Florida instead of Washington, D.C.

Ahead of the ruling and after, I’ve noticed some speculation that this otherwise obscure Supreme Court case might have factored into Smith’s charging decision — but I’m not sure that’s so.

To understand why, let's examine what venue is, what the Supreme Court case is about, and how this all factored into Smith’s venue decision — or didn’t.

For starters, venue is a super important issue generally. It’s a constitutional requirement that says prosecutors need to bring cases where the crime allegedly occurred. So, for instance, a prosecutor can't charge someone for murder in New York if it happened in California and there's no New York connection. Making the wrong venue choice can be fatal to a criminal case.

In this new case decided Thursday, which, annoyingly for purposes of this discussion, involves a defendant named Timothy Smith, the issue wasn’t whether venue matters but how it matters. Specifically, the question was whether the Constitution permits a retrial following an improperly venued trial with a jury from the wrong district, or whether the case is over for good. In a unanimous opinion, the Supreme Court said retrial is the answer.

So if you’re a prosecutor who tried a case with improper venue, you’re happy with Thursday's decision. Perhaps you'll get another shot to do it right. But what does that have to do with Smith choosing Florida over Washington?

That’s not entirely clear to me. For Timothy Smith v. United States .. https://www.oyez.org/cases/2022/21-1576 .. to have mattered to Jack Smith’s venue choice, we would need to entertain the possibility that, had this Supreme Court decision come out before the special counsel made his venue decision, he would have chosen Washington over Florida.


Jack Smith delivers remarks on a recently unsealed indictment against former President Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., on June 9, 2023.
Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

While we don’t know what exactly went into Smith’s thinking, there are at least a couple of reasons that seems unlikely. For one thing, if Smith thought this now-favorable ruling for the government would have enabled him to charge Trump in Washington instead of Florida, then he could have waited at most a month for the Supreme Court to finish issuing decisions this term. We don’t know ahead of time which cases are coming each opinion day, but the court generally wraps up in late June.

So if the only thing stopping Smith from drawing from a more favorable jury and judge pool in Washington was this decision, it would have been worth the wait — especially if the upshot is him having the option of retrying the entire case again in Florida after a court rules that he errantly did so in Washington, a process that would take much longer than a month to play out.

Perhaps more fundamentally, Smith wants to make the correct venue decision in the first place. If it turns out that he didn’t, then he’d obviously rather have a retrial than an outright dismissal. But that doesn’t change the fact that the venue choice still needs to be correct or else the case is thrown into question, even if it isn't gone for good under this new precedent.

Ultimately, it seems Smith chose to bring charges in Florida because he thinks that’s the proper venue, not out of fear that he wouldn’t be able to retry the case if he brought it in the wrong place.

Especially against the backdrop of the 2024 election whose outcome could make the case go away .. https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house/deadline-legal-blog/trump-indictment-2024-presidential-election-rcna87760 , Smith didn’t bring this historic prosecution to retry it.

Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a former prosecutor for the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house/deadline-legal-blog/supreme-court-venue-jack-smith-trump-rcna89543