Yesterday, Trump’s legal team at O’Melveny & Myers filed an unusual motion to examine the more than 100 individuals who have been selected as potential jurors for the upcoming Trump University fraud trial in San Diego. Invoking the 1968 Jury Selection and Service Act, the team requested to know how each of the potential jurors were summoned and selected, to view any lists, questionnaires or documents that were used, to examine transcripts from juror screenings as well as to know who conducted them, and whether any jurors were given the ‘name or nature of the case.’ The request comes one week after lawyers for Trump filed a motion requesting that the 28 November trial date be delayed until after the 20 January inauguration. That request is still pending.

Ensuring impartiality

Both loved and reviled, there’s unlikely to be a single person in the United States who doesn’t have an opinion on the business tycoon, rogue Republican candidate and now future president Donald Trump. That fact is clearly not lost on Trump’s lawyers, who cited in their motion a federal law which grants parties in civil suits the right to stay or halt a case prior to juror selection if the preliminary process has failed to return a ‘fair cross-section of the community.’ University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke Law School professor Andrew Guthrie Ferguson told The National Law Journal: ‘The type of case presents some real difficult questions from both sides because emotions are quite charged about the election. People will be bringing that emotion into court, and the question is whether they can put it aside.’

Sources: National Law Journal; San Diego Union-Tribune