CNN Senior Legal Analyst Elie Honig predicted that Donald Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial will need the maximum of six alternate jurors in case several jurors get sick, become “spooked, or “freaked out” to the point where they cannot continue.
A jury of 12, plus one alternate, were seated in the Trump case as of Thursday evening, with Judge Juan Merchan saying he hoped to have all alternates seated by the end of court Friday.
Trump is facing 34 felony charges of falsifying business records to conceal affairs he had before the 2016 election. He has pleaded not guilty.
Honig and Anderson Cooper discussed how quickly Judge Merchan moved forward with the jury selection, with Honig saying he thinks “it’s a good sign for the speed with which we can get this trial in.”
Cooper asked how many alternate jurors are still needed, now that one has already been selected.
“The law says you can have up to six. I think in this case, I would want all six because, look, we lost two seated jurors today,” Honig said. “Now, it gets harder legally, once the jurors are sworn in, it gets much harder for a judge to release a juror. But jurors get sick. Jurors get freaked out. Some of them could be spooked by a social media post. So, they’re gonna need all six.”
Cooper asked, “If jurors who are actually seated start to ‘freak out,’ as you say, and just try to get off, those alternatives would fill in. And if the alternates are exhausted…then you got a mistrial?”
Honig answered that that was true, although he didn’t think “we’re going to cycle through all six,” saying “that would be quite extreme.”
“But I would bet we’re going to lose one or two along the way. Whether someone gets Covid, someone sees something on the news that they’re not supposed to see — jurors do drop out once in a while,” Honig said.
Two of the previously seven seated jurors were dismissed Thursday after expressing concerns that their identities would be leaked through media reports.
Watch the clip above via CNN.
