-- Shares Facebook Twitter Reddit Email The instructions provided to jurors in former President Donald Trump's Trump's trial Wednesday are largely routine — but will prove crucial in allowing the 12 jurors to weigh the "avalanche" of testimony provided by prosecutors, legal experts told Salon. "We have one of the biggest cases in our nation's history," said Southwestern Law School professor Richard Lorren Jolly. "We're a deliberative democracy.
And there's something incredibly beautiful about that, and whether a conviction results or an acquittal, this is how the system is supposed to work." Trump himself has questioned the supposed political bias of jurors, and proclaimed himself the victim of a vast Democratic witch-hunt. But legal experts say the 55 pages worth of jury instructions provided by Judge Juan Merchan provide an important blueprint that continues to educate jurors on our legal system as they begin deliberating on weeks of testimony.
"There's been a lot of attacks on this idea that the jury is somehow unqualified or politically biased," Jolly told Salon. "And those have always been attacks on the juries and institution going back hundreds of years, but our constitutional commitment to it is on full display here." Related Legal expert calls out Trump lawyer's "blatant and wholly inappropriate" closing message to jury Former federal prosecutor Mary McCord, executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection (ICAP) and a Visiting Profess.
