Trump lawyers facing 'an uphill climb' to get appeals court to bow to his wishes
The odds of attorneys for Donald Trump to get an appeals court to rule in their client's favor if they appeal his conviction on 34 felony counts are slim at best.
That is according to appellate lawyer and a former N.Y. prosecutor Robert Stavis in a column for the New York Times, where he claimed he sees no egregious errors made by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's office or how judge Juan Merchan conducted the trial.
Decreasing Trump's odds of a favorable ruling is the fact that the appeals court's history documents the fact that the justices only toss out convictions in approximately 4 to 6 percent of cases.
According to Stavis, "To warrant reversal of a jury’s verdict on account of an error, the appellate court must find that an error of some kind led directly to the conviction. A technical error that does not rise to that level is called a 'harmless error' and will not cause a reversal of a conviction."
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The attorney noted that there appears to be only one avenue for the Trump legal team to pursue, writing that "if the Appellate Division has some concerns with the verdict, it will probably focus on the legal theory that provided the framework for the trial. This will offer the strongest chance for a successful appeal."
"When the appellate court digs into the complicated nature of these charges after Mr. Trump inevitably appeals, it must decide if the charges were unduly vague and thus may have violated constitutional due process," he explained before adding that another Trump legal loss at the appellate level may never get a Supreme Court hearing.
"For the case to reach the U.S. Supreme Court, it must reach and get through a decision of the Court of Appeals. But this seems like an unlikely case for the Supreme Court to hear; the appellate issue concerns a New York criminal statute, rather than the type of grave constitutional or federal statutory issue ordinarily reviewed by the Supreme Court," he wrote.
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