Please start your comments with the following question answered at the top:

“Will you vote for Biden in the 2024 election?” [Y/N]

  • frezik
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    9 months ago

    The prosecutor has been going over literally tens of thousands of pages of evidence to build a case. The defense is also entitled to go over many of the same documents. Short of hiring a literal army of lawyers, there is no way to speed this up. Even hiring an army doesn’t solve everything. Communication channels increase geometrically with the size of the team, and past a certain point, it slows things down more than it helps. Worse, combinations of things can be missed by two different people seeing two different documents that together would point to something, but it’s never adequately communicated across the team.

    The trial you speak of is the end result of months to years of this process. It typically takes 12-18 months for a federal prosecution to get to that point. Even that is after they’ve been gathering evidence for some time before that. Trump’s case is nothing unusual in that regard.

    On top of that, federal judges have an oversized case load. We could probably quadruple the size of the federal bench to get it to something reasonable. Which means there’s a very good reason to expand the bench beyond unfucking the fact that Trump stuffed it after McConnell held a bunch of seats open under Obama.

    The one thing that is uniquely slowing it down is the Supreme Court taking up the presidential immunity challenge. The other federal trials are on hold until they make some kind of decision. That wouldn’t necessarily mean a full hearing of the Supreme Court, or if it does get that far, they may undo the stay that’s currently stopping trials from proceeding. If so, that would be an indication that they don’t think Trump has immunity, but want to put their stamp on a constitutional issue that hasn’t come before the court before.

    Otherwise, this is how the system works for everyone. It needs to be fixed in general, but Trump is not getting any special treatment. This length of time is far from unusual.

    • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      So put a literal army of lawyers on it. It’s not like it’s important or anything.

      • QuaternionsRock@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Let me get this straight - you want the government to cut a check made out to Donald Trump for a “literal army” of lawyers? Because that’s how that would work. The criminal justice system cannot place an unreasonable financial burden on a defendant that is presumed innocent.

        • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          Lmamamamamamamamao

          Hold on.

          The criminal justice system cannot place an unreasonable financial burden on a defendant that is presumed innocent.

          Yup still laughing. Just a minute.

          Okay okay. If Martha mother of 2 can end up homeless, in and out of jail, and jobless, because her court appointed attorney got her a not guilty verdict then Trump can fucking pay for lawyers.

          • QuaternionsRock@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            If Martha mother of 2 can end up homeless, in and out of jail, and jobless, because her court appointed attorney got her a not guilty verdict

            Did you mean a guilty verdict? In either case, you have a point. The justice system is far from perfect, and what you’ve described is a perfect example of that: courts tend to respect financial burden more than they do conflicting obligations (e.g. a job). But should we be advocating for an objectively worse legal system because Trump is protected from being forced to choose between inadequate representation or shelling out tens of millions of dollars? I don’t think so.