Dershowitz Says Trump Could Fast-Track His Appeal to Supreme Court

 

Amid speculation about how former President Donald Trump’s appeal of his conviction will play out, retired Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz said he thinks there’s a way the former president can expedite the process to get it before the U.S. Supreme Court before the November presidential election.

President Trump vowed to appeal his guilty verdict in a case in which he was charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records in order to conceal non-disclosure payments as part of an alleged bid to influence the 2016 presidential election when he was a candidate.

While legal experts told The Epoch Times that standard practice is that all possible appeals in the New York state court system must first be exhausted before an appeal ends up before the Supreme Court, there has been speculation about whether that process could be accelerated.

Amid allegations that the trial was politically driven and riddled with bias, there have even been calls for the Supreme Court to intervene at an earlier stage, before the state appeals process is exhausted.

For instance, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said that the Supreme Court should “step in” and overturn the conviction, with the speaker arguing that the circumstances of the case have led to an erosion of public faith in America’s justice system.

Mr. Johnson, and others, have argued that the case was a backhanded attempt to tarnish President Trump’s reputation in the minds of voters and undercut his chances at election, and that the Supreme Court should have a chance to weigh in before voters head to the polls in November to restore a sense of fairness.

Fast-Tracking the Appeal?

The retired law professor said that President Trump’s legal team should push to get its appeal heard immediately before the New York Court of Appeals, which is the highest court in New York state and the last step before a petition can be filed at the U.S. Supreme Court. However, appeals to this court are not automatic and generally require permission from the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court—or from the New York Court of Appeals itself.

“He should make an appeal to the New York Court of Appeals asking them to bypass the Appellate Division because he’s not going to get justice in the Appellate Division,” Mr. Dershowitz said, speculating that Appellate Division judges are elected and would be more likely to bow to pressure to reject the Trump team’s appeal.

“The Appellate Division or Manhattan judges that are elected and they don’t want to have to face their families and say you were the judge who allowed Trump to become the next President of the United States. They don’t want to be Dershowitz'ed,” he said, referring to blowback he received after defending President Trump in his first impeachment trial in the Senate.

“They don’t want to be treated in New York, the way I have been treated in Martha’s Vineyard and Harvard and New York because I defended Donald Trump, so they should skip the Appellate Division,” he continued.

Instead, Trump attorneys should directly petition the highest appeals court in New York state and ask for an accelerated process to get their case before the Supreme Court.

“Go to the New York Court of Appeals, ask for an expedited appeal. In the meantime, prepare for an expedited appeal in the United States Supreme Court and say that this was a rush to try to get this case, a verdict of conviction before election, and the Supreme Court of the United States has an obligation to review this case before the election so that the American public knows whether or not Donald Trump is guilty or not guilty of these made up crimes,” Mr. Dershowitz said.

The former Harvard law professor has in the past accused Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg of unfairly building the case against the former president by using a novel legal theory to elevate misdemeanor business falsification charges into a felony by alleging that the records fraud was carried out to conceal an underlying crime. In the Trump case, the underlying crime that was alleged was seeking to interfere in the 2016 election by using non-disclosure agreements to prevent unfavorable media coverage about an alleged affair with adult film actress Stormy Daniels that the former president has denied.

Mr. Dershowitz said that Trump attorneys should consider supporting their petition to the New York Court of Appeals by highlighting two issues, with the first relating to the fact that the state’s highest court recently reversed Harvey Weinstein’s rape conviction because the trial judge prejudicially allowed testimony on allegations unrelated to the case.

The retired law professor alleged that Judge Juan Merchan “improperly” allowed irrelevant salacious details of President Trump’s alleged tryst with Ms. Daniels to be admitted into the record, while also raising the so-called “missing witness” issue.

The second point that Mr. Dershowitz said would bolster a petition for an expedited review to the New York Court of Appeals is that the judge allegedly didn’t instruct the jury properly on why prosecutors didn’t call former Trump Organization CFO Alan Weisselberg to testify in the case. The judge was open to having Mr. Weisselberg testify but the prosecution didn’t call him, framing him as an unreliable witness due to earlier perjury charges in an unrelated case, while the defense also didn’t call him, citing the fact that prosecutors had undermined his credibility.

Mr. Dershowitz argued that failure to call Mr. Weisselberg left a hole in proving the case because it was expected that his testimony would have undermined some of the claims from another witness, former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, who testified against the former president.

“Number two, I think would be the failure to give an instruction on the missing witness,” Mr. Dershowitz said. “The way the judge and the prosecution handled Allen Weisselberg really denied the defendant the right to a presumption that the only reason he wasn’t called was because he would not have corroborated the very important testimony, lying testimony of Michael Cohen.”

Mr. Dershowitz said those two issues are what Trump attorneys should highlight in their request for an expedited appeal.

“This is a winnable appeal,” he insisted.

The Epoch Times was unable to reach Trump counsel for comment on Mr. Dershowitz’s remarks.

The guilty verdict made President Trump the first former president in U.S. history to be convicted of a crime.