The “totally uncommon” prospect of two lawyers serving on the same jury could benefit the former president, some jury experts say.
As if there weren’t enough plot twists in Donald Trump’s legal saga, this week’s jury selection has produced one more: At least two lawyers will sit on his jury.
That could be good news for the former president, according to some experts on juror behavior, especially if Trump’s defense team plans to mount technical legal arguments to try to win an acquittal.
Lawyers are called for jury duty like anyone else, but they rarely serve as jurors, and it’s “totally uncommon” to see two or more lawyers on a single jury, said trial consultant Charli Morris.
But of the seven jurors selected for Trump’s hush money trial so far, one is a civil litigator at a large white-shoe law firm, and another is a corporate lawyer at a firm focused on start-ups and venture capital. Five more jurors, plus about six alternates, will be selected in the coming days.
Typically, prosecutors and defense lawyers alike try to keep lawyers off juries, fearing heightened scrutiny from members of their own profession. But in a Manhattan jury pool that is largely seen as unfavorable to the former president, Trump’s legal team might see a silver lining in having lawyers on the jury.
“They’re not emotional thinkers,” said Galina Davidoff, a Chicago-based trial consultant. “The profession requires them to do analysis, and emotional thinkers get more easily swayed by the side that goes first, that tells a good story.”
There’s no question that Manhattan prosecutors will tell a story that captures jurors’ attention — a tale featuring a porn star, a former Playboy bunny, a tabloid publisher and the most famous person on earth. Trump’s defense team may be hoping that lawyers will be more receptive than laypeople to a focus on legal arguments and technical issues.
“I’m sure the team is going to have a story to tell in defense of Donald Trump,” said Betty Dunkum, a Florida-based trial consultant. “But if the story is going to involve a lot of technical issues, and possibly legal issues involving the jury instructions and things like that, then you might want someone who’s going to take a more highly technical view of the case.”
Indeed, in the lead-up to the trial, Trump’s surrogates sought to portray the charges — 34 felony counts of falsifying business documents — as technical bookkeeping violations with no discernible victim. It’s a stark contrast to the prosecution’s narrative, which frames the case as a scheme to perpetrate election interference by covering up a sex scandal in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign.
Of course, not all lawyers fit the mold described by Davidoff and Dunkum. But as Trump himself recently acknowledged, jury selection is a game of luck, in which lawyers for both sides try to assess the predilections of strangers based on a few questions in court and some quick research into their backgrounds.
In run-of-the-mill cases, both prosecutors and defense teams often weed out fellow lawyers from the jury pool — or even prospective jurors with lawyers in their families. A common worry is that people with legal expertise will do their own legal analysis, rather than following the judge’s instructions.
One of the lawyers on Trump’s jury, the civil litigator, signaled during jury selection that he was well aware of that concern.
“I’m a litigator,” he said, “so I take the law seriously, and I take judges’ instructions very seriously.”
Apparently that was good enough for Trump’s team and Manhattan prosecutors. On Tuesday, both sides used several of their “peremptory strikes” — which allow them to exclude some prospective jurors without providing a reason — but did not strike either the civil litigator or the corporate lawyer.
Though lawyers on juries are held to the same standards as anyone else — a vow to consider only the evidence they see in the courtroom, and to follow the instructions given by the judge — their presence on other criminal juries has caused headaches. That’s because their fellow jurors often view them as experts on the proceedings and follow their lead.
“I typically don’t leave lawyers on a panel unless I’m one thousand percent confident that they would lean toward my client, because they will have such a strong leadership position in a jury,” Dunkum said.
For example, a juror who sat on the trial of several members of the far-right Oath Keepers organization who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, revealed that a lawyer on the panel helped lead deliberations and even summarized the judge’s complicated instructions at the end of the case. Defense lawyers for several of those convicted groused about the dynamic but had little recourse after the verdict.
Lawyers — or aspiring ones — can also plant landmines by misinstructing their fellow jurors.
In one widely publicized episode from the 1980s, a juror about to enter law school helped persuade colleagues on a Washington federal court jury to return a $2 million defamation verdict against The Washington Post over an article suggesting nepotism by the then-president of Mobil Oil, William Tavoulareas.
After the verdict, the American Lawyer magazine reported that the foreperson of the jury had managed to convince several fellow jurors that the Post had a legal duty to prove its story true, even though the judge had instructed the jurors that the legal burden was actually on Tavoulareas to prove the story false.
The judge later overturned the verdict, and a federal appeals court eventually upheld that decision, effectively ending the case.
Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney contributed to this report.
