Analysis | Trump’s election defence: sway 1 juror with ‘reasonable doubt’
- Donald Trump is facing a historic criminal trial for his alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 election results and defraud the United States
- Defence lawyers have a variety of options for swaying jurors. Legal experts say the arguments are long-shots, but not impossible
Donald Trump’s indictment over his attempts to overturn the 2020 election is the biggest challenge yet for his squad of lawyers, who’ve been hitting the airwaves to preview defences for what could eventually be the most consequential criminal trial in US history.
If Trump’s legal team can raise reasonable doubt in the mind of one juror – by blaming his lawyers or arguing that his false claims of election fraud were protected by the First Amendment, for example – the case brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith would collapse, forcing the US government to choose between dropping the charges or retrying Trump.
Legal experts say the defences are all long-shots, but not impossible. Trump’s lawyer John Lauro has signalled that reasonable doubt is central to his strategy.
“The government, the Biden administration, would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump did not believe that he had won the election,” Lauro said on NBC’s Meet the Press on August 6. “They will never be able to do that. And that’s why this prosecution is so ill-conceived.”
02:18
US former president Donald Trump pleads not guilty to 2020 election charges
The basic US legal principle of reasonable doubt gives Trump’s lawyers plenty to work with, even if many of his critics see the case as a slam dunk. Convictions need to be unanimous, and one holdout on a jury can sink a case.
“One of the challenges in our system is that reasonable doubt is only sort of defined – it’s not statistical or numerical – and jurors have to form in their own minds what reasonable doubt is,” said Jennifer Rodgers, a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan who’s now a lecturer at Columbia Law School.