The news came on Thursday, May 30, and was stunning – if hardly unexpected. Former President and current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was found guilty on all 34 charges of “falsifying business records” by a Manhattan jury. Headlines blared the intended message: Trump was a “CONVICTED FELON”!
Democrat officeholders, and even Republicans of the sort that support the Lincoln Project, crowed with delight. Republicans of a more Republican stamp echoed Trump in condemning the jury’s decision as a miscarriage of justice.
Trump was not convicted of anything connected to pro-life activism. But activists subject to the U.S. judicial system saw a lot in the progress of his trial that struck them as familiar.
Why are we at Life Legal even commenting on this issue? Does the pro-life movement need to say anything here about Trump? Hasn’t he recently made comments that put him into the compromise camp?
Right after Roe v. Wade collapsed, one of our finest litigators remarked that President Trump was “a deeply flawed figure to whom we owed an enormous debt of gratitude.” Trump did not, of course, toss Roe into history’s dustbin all by himself. Mitch McConnell guided Trump’s Supreme Court picks.
Still, it was Trump who pushed them through the difficult confirmation process. Without Trump, Brett Kavanaugh especially would have ended up borked.
But it is not out of loyalty to Trump that we’re commenting now. We are lawyers, and the stench of this conviction is impossible for us to ignore.
The very charges verged on the ridiculous. Trump was accused of falsifying records concerning a non-disclosure agreement with porn star Stormy Daniels in order to “interfere” with the election he won in 2016. But the records were made in 2017, after the election. Is Trump supposed to be a Time Lord? Is he alleged to be associated with the unsavory Dr. Who?
Beyond this instance of lunacy, many features of Trump’s trial bear a more-than-passing resemblance to the treatment pro-lifers have received in court.
- Hostile jury pool. Manhattan is overwhelmingly liberal Democrat and disdainful of Republican Trump. San Francisco, where the case against the Center for Medical Progress was tried, is also overwhelmingly liberal and supportive of unlimited abortion.
- Conflicted judge. The judge in Trump’s case boasted a daughter who worked on Democrat campaigns. The wife of the judge overseeing the lawsuit against CMP was an outspoken Facebook fan of Planned Parenthood and reposted a demand that David Daleiden be prosecuted.
- Allowing prejudicial evidence. Against Trump, Stormy Daniels received carte blanche to present lengthy, salacious, and inconsistent testimony that had no bearing on the charges. Against CMP, Planned Parenthood was permitted to present irrelevant testimony from an “expert on anti-abortion terrorism.”
- Failure to specify offense. Trump’s indictment didn’t specify the crime that his alleged bad-boy bookkeeping was intended to conceal. The verdict against CMP hung on the blissfully undefined phrase “directly caused.”
- Exclusion of exculpatory evidence. Trump’s team wanted to call former FEC Chair Bradley Smith – but the judge pre-excluded his most relevant testimony. Trump witness Robert Costello’s testimony was stymied by constant objections from the prosecution, all upheld by the court. CMP was not even allowed to show the jury the videos that the lawsuit was all about. And the D.C. 9, recently sentenced in the nation’s capital, were not allowed to present evidence that they were confronting criminal wrongdoing on the part of late-term abortion ghoul Cesare Santangelo.
- Lack of a unanimous verdict. Even in jury instructions, Trump’s judge refused to specify a crime. Instead, jurors were presented with a mix-and-match grab bag of possibilities, any one of which would supposedly justify voting against Trump. In a real trial, jurors must be unanimous not only in the ultimate verdict but in each element of a specific crime. The judge overseeing the trial of pro-life pastor Walter Hoye committed the exact same error, ultimately resulting in his conviction being overturned, though only after he had served his jail sentence.
Way back in 1940, Robert H. Jackson, soon to become an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, cautioned federal prosecutors about a tendency that alarmed him even then: “It is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and looking for the man who committed it. It is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him.”
This is what’s happened to Donald Trump. And it’s what is attempted against many pro-lifers when their witness becomes too effective.