Many voters say they donā€™t want a convicted felon in the White House. But do they mean it? And can prosecutors get to trial before the vote?

Many voters say they donā€™t want a convicted felon in the White House. But do they mean it? And can prosecutors get to trial before the vote?

Can anything stop former President Donald Trumpā€™s reelection campaign juggernaut, now that Trump has all but crushed his GOP primary opponents and pulled ahead of President Joe Biden in national polls?

While November is a long time away, and plenty could happen before then, voters do say Trump has a massive weakness: A potential criminal conviction. In poll after poll, lots of voters who shrug off Trumpā€™s four indictments say they wouldnā€™t support him if heā€™s convicted of a felony. If they mean itā€”or even if a big chunk of them doā€”they could easily be enough to keep him out of the White House.

What remains to be seen, of course, is whether they mean itā€”and, crucially, whether prosecutors can put Trump on trial in time for the rest of us to find out.

That makes prosecutorsā€™ race against the clock one of the most important narratives of the 2024 election cycle, as teams of lawyers work feverishly around the country to overcome Trumpā€™s efforts to gum up the gears of the judicial system and push the start-date of all his trials past November.

    • EpeeGnome@lemm.eeEnglish
      26Ā·
      9 months ago

      TeChNiCaLlY, unless I missed something big, he wasnā€™t convicted of the rape. That requires a criminal trial. A jury did find that he raped her as a material fact in a civil trial, so we can say with legal certainty that it happened, but until an actual conviction, it will be used as a excuse to avoid holding him to account for it. Of course a bunch of the right are the type to blame the victim or wave it off entirely for that particular crime anyway so I donā€™t know how much difference even a conviction would make to them.

      • DarkGamer@kbin.social
        101Ā·
        9 months ago

        thank you for the clarification. Looking into definitions, evidently the word ā€œconvictedā€ only refers to criminal proceedings, as you say.

        • orbit@lemmy.world
          7Ā·
          9 months ago

          Yeah youā€™re right and I think weā€™re looking for civily liable instead of conviction in this scenario - not that it should make a difference.

          • EpeeGnome@lemm.eeEnglish
            2Ā·
            9 months ago

            The technicalities can get weird, but it makes a huge difference. In the US (it works differently in different legal systems) even the defendantā€™s basic constitutional rights are different between civil and criminal proceedings. For example you canā€™t plead the 5th (invoke the right to not be compelled to provide incriminating evidence against yourself) in a civil trial because your testimony couldnā€™t incriminate when the trialā€™s not criminal. Any evidence gathered this way in a civil trial is therefore inadmissible in a criminal trial about the same matters. Thatā€™s why Bill Cosby got his rape conviction overturned on appeal. A lot of the criminal case against him was based on evidence he was compelled to give when he got sued over it earlier, so it shouldnā€™t have been allowed in the criminal trial. The appeal didnā€™t find him innocent, just that the conviction had to be thrown out because the process had violated his rights.

            • orbit@lemmy.world
              2Ā·
              9 months ago

              I was referring to the perception from the results of the trial by the public, but youā€™ve given me quite a bit to mull over. Appreciate the context.

      • ReallyActuallyFrankenstein@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
        3Ā·
        9 months ago

        But just to avoid being overtechnical, if you want to say Trump raped Carroll, you can accurately say so:

        A judge has now clarified that this is basically a legal distinction without a real-world difference. He says that what the jury found Trump did was in fact rape, as commonly understood.

        The filing from Judge Lewis A. Kaplan came as Trumpā€™s attorneys have sought a new trial and have argued that the juryā€™s $5 million verdict against Trump in the civil suit was excessive. The reason, they argue, is that sexual abuse could be as limited as the ā€œgropingā€ of a victimā€™s breasts.

        Kaplan roundly rejected Trumpā€™s motion Tuesday, calling that argument ā€œentirely unpersuasive.ā€

        ā€œThe finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ā€˜rapedā€™ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ā€˜rapedā€™ her as many people commonly understand the word ā€˜rape,ā€™ ā€ Kaplan wrote.

        He added: ā€œIndeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.ā€

        Kaplan said New Yorkā€™s legal definition of ā€œrapeā€ is ā€œfar narrowerā€ than the word is understood in ā€œcommon modern parlance.ā€

        https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/19/trump-carroll-judge-rape/