What Must the Jury Be Thinking about Why Trump Is on Trial? Andrew McCarthy
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/what-must-the-jury-be-thinking-about-why-trump-is-on-trial/
With former president Trump’s criminal trial now in its fourth week of testimony, I wonder what the Manhattan jury must be thinking about the resources the elected Democratic district attorney is devoting to it.
The majority of crime goes unreported. Of that which is reported, the number of crime cases that are “solved” — what police call the “clearance rate” — is alarmingly low. That is especially the case in Manhattan. Last week, the Manhattan Institute’s Tim Rosenberger noted in the City Journal that less than three in ten cases (29.8 percent) are cleared.
In New York City in 2022 (the last year for which there are complete annual stats), there were over 156,000 arrests. A little less than half of them, about 72,000, were felony arrests — nearly 29,000 categorized as violent felonies. All of these arrests resulted in less than 12,000 indictments. More disturbing, still, is the bottom line: Those 156,000 arrests yielded a grand total of just 4,375 prison sentences — i.e., sentences of incarceration were imposed in less than 3 percent of arrest cases.
As you think about that, bear in mind that many attacks that normal people would consider violent are deemed non-violent in New York if no serious injuries result. Consequently, many forcible attacks that result in arrests are charged by prosecutors as misdemeanor assaults. The Manhattan Institute’s Hannah Meyers points out on X/Twitter that many misdemeanor assault cases are “disposed” by simply being dismissed: Last year, the dismissal rate in New York City was 66 percent, having surged from 45 percent a decade ago.
Meyers further reports that recidivism is at its highest level in seven years — a fact acknowledged by NYPD Crime Control Strategies Chief Michael Lipetri, correcting false claims of improvement by public advocate and gubernatorial hopeful Jumaane Williams, one of the city’s many progressive champions of criminal-justice “reform.” An extraordinary amount of crime is committed by repeat offenders, who are on the streets rather than behind bars because of Democratic-dominated New York’s hostility to prosecution and imprisonment.
Yet, DA Bragg seems to have bottomless resources (prosecutors, investigators, funding) to throw at a seven-year-old business-records allegation against the Democrats’ principal political rival — normally, a misdemeanor that would not even be prosecuted in a city whose resources are too strapped to address major crime adequately, but that Bragg has inflated into a 34-count felony indictment (on which his proof appears woefully inadequate).
What must the jurors be thinking? Probably about whether they’ll be safe on the streets and the subway as they make their way home from court.
Comments are closed.
