On Wednesday (April 5), legal experts revealed that former President Donald Trump’s Sixth Amendment rights could have been violated when Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg refused to disclose the crime Trump allegedly committed by falsifying company records.
The Sixth Amendment bestows on a person accused of a crime the right to be informed of the charge’s “nature and cause” and “to be confronted with witnesses against him;” and be able to obtain witnesses in his favor.
When a reporter asked Bragg what the underlying crime was, as it hadn’t been mentioned on the indictment, the Manhattan District Attorney asserted that New York state law didn’t require it.
Speaking on “Hannity,” Greg Jarrett, Fox News’s legal analyst, strongly rejected Bragg’s assertions, saying that it violated Trump’s right to know the specific accusations.
Jarrett insisted that Bragg should have named the accusation because of the Sixth Amendment.
The legal expert noted that because Bragg hadn’t, the indictment was “facially defective,” adding that at face value, the indictment was “susceptible to a Motion-to-dismiss.”
Jarret also wondered if Bragg had slept through constitutional law while studying at Harvard, envisioning a scenario where Bragg was fixated on getting Trump on a crime, suggesting that the Manhattan District Attorney mumbled to himself, “What crime? what crime?”
Jarrett elaborated on the vision, imagining that Bragg’s mumbles were met with a response from a clerk in his office that he didn’t need to “say anything” on the indictment.
The legal expert also recalled a warning former Supreme Court Justice and Nuremberg Trial prosecutor Robert H. Jackson gave, which described the “greatest danger to justice” being an “unscrupulous prosecutor” who “targets” someone and then goes in search of a crime.
