As the various criminal proceedings against Donald Trump have traveled at times tortuous routes in recent years, a frequent refrain has been that he is escaping consequences for some of his most serious alleged misconduct. But this week he finally faced the start of a criminal trial, in the New York courtroom of Judge Juan Merchan. And as proceedings turn to opening statements Monday, what we have seen so far suggests that the artful dodger of accountability may have finally met his match.
In Merchan’s courtroom, our country’s bedrock principle that no one is above the law is flourishing. In this first week of proceedings, the jury selection process proved resilient and, despite challenges, moved much faster than many thought.
Merchan has so far managed this trial just as judges all over the country run their criminal courts each day.
As one of the authors recently outlined in a new book on the trial, the court will need to seat 18 jurors in total: 12 who will sit on the jury and six alternates, in case any of the regular jurors drops out or is discharged. Any adult resident of New York County is a prospective member of the jury pool.
Merchan has so far managed this trial just as judges all over the country run their criminal courts each day. First, he took the jurors in batches, in this case panels of 96 individuals. Merchan accelerated what could have been a drawn-out process by asking the panel whether they felt they could be impartial; more than half said they could not and were immediately dismissed. The same happened again on Thursday, with more than half of the group excused.
Some may feel that the large number of the pool proactively admitting to bias is proof that Trump cannot get a fair trial in Manhattan. In fact, it proves just the opposite. The jury selection process is a time-tested institution of our legal system. In most criminal trials, at least some members of the jury pool admit bias, whether based on the nature of the charges or on strong opinions they hold about elements of the case, and are dismissed. For those who remain, lawyers on both sides have the opportunity to probe for bias and strike jurors to winnow down the pool to those who can be fair and impartial.
That’s exactly what Trump’s attorneys — and the prosecution — did here. At Trump’s trial, each juror answered more than 40 questions, ranging from the biographical (“Are you married?”), to the case-specific (“Have you ever read Michael Cohen’s book?”). The attorneys then questioned each prospective juror to determine whether there were grounds to challenge a juror “for cause”—because their answers show they cannot be fair and impartial.
Here, Trump’s attorneys grilled the jury pool on old social media posts the attorneys had unearthed from their accounts. This tactic met with success, as Merchan dismissed a number of prospective jurors out of an abundance of caution on the grounds that their prior posts may compromise their impartiality.
Inside the courtroom Trump must follow the same rules as any other criminal defendant.
Beyond this questioning, each party also gets 10 peremptory challenges for the regular jurors (and two for each alternate seat), essentially a no-questions-asked ability to strike a prospective juror. Even with both sides dismissing jurors both for cause and through peremptory challenges, after only three days of jury selection, by the end of the week a full 12-person jury and six alternates had been seated.








