Judge Juan Merchan raised a scare Friday when he sent a letter to the lawyers in Donald Trump’s New York criminal case about a social media post that, if genuine, would have raised juror misconduct concerns. But given that the post appears to have been a prank, there’s no reason to think that it will upend Trump’s guilty verdict, though the record may need to be cleared up by the time he is sentenced next month.
Merchan’s letter said that he had just become aware of a Facebook comment on an unrelated state court system post ahead of Trump’s verdict, in which the commenter claimed to be the cousin of a Trump juror and that the supposed juror said that “Trump is getting convicted.”
If that were true, that would raise the prospect of the defense moving to set aside the verdict ahead of sentencing. But the issue, such as it was, was seemingly quickly resolved by the poster, who claimed, in effect, to have been joking.
So Trump’s lawyers are free to try to make an issue of this, but they won’t get far under the known facts and applicable law. Motions to set aside the verdict for juror misconduct need to show:
That during the trial there occurred, out of the presence of the court, improper conduct by a juror, or improper conduct by another person in relation to a juror, which may have affected a substantial right of the defendant and which was not known to the defendant prior to the rendition of the verdict.
As it stands, there’s no reason to think that anything of the sort happened here. Nonetheless, that should officially be clarified on the record by the time Trump is sentenced July 11. He’ll be appealing multiple legal issues as he challenges his historic conviction but, given what we know now, we shouldn’t anticipate this being one of them — at least not successfully. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for weekly updates on the top legal stories, including news from the Supreme Court, the Donald Trump cases and more.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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