The Trump trial completed a week of jury selection, finalizing a panel of 12 jurors and 6 alternates
In the hush money case against Donald Trump in New York, a judge selected five alternate jurors, wrapping up the jury selection phase. The process concluded more quickly than expected, encountering challenges with jurors’ preconceived opinions about Trump. Journalists reported on the selection details, revealing insights about the jurors chosen, including their backgrounds and interests. Prospective jurors underwent questioning to assess impartiality throughout the selection process.
A New York judge chose five jurors on Friday to serve as alternates in the hush money case against Donald Trump, marking the conclusion of the jury selection phase of the former president’s trial.
The process, which began Monday in Manhattan, wrapped up more quickly than some legal experts had anticipated but still featured its share of challenges throughout the week. Judge Juan Merchan and attorneys repeatedly encountered prospective jurors with preconceived opinions about Trump, and controversy arose at one point over journalists reporting information about jurors that made them potentially identifiable.
A pool of reporters in the courtroom circulated details about the selection process as it played out.
Of the alternate jurors selected on Friday, one is a native New Yorker who works in technology and whose father was a police officer in Mexico. He said he is a martial arts enthusiast and practices a lot.
Another was a woman who was originally from Spain, had lived in New York for nearly two decades, and does not work.
The remaining three were a woman who is president of her two children’s parent-teacher association, a Chinatown resident who does creative operations for a clothing company, and a divorced woman who likes true crime podcasts.
Beginning Monday, Merchan had welcomed prospective jurors into the courtroom in waves of 96 people at a time. Those groups were each cut by about half when Merchan asked them at the outset of the selection process if they felt they could not be impartial in Trump’s case.
The remaining prospective jurors then answered a preset questionnaire to provide more in-depth information about themselves, including where they read their news, if they had participated in pro-Trump or anti-Trump rallies, what radio shows or podcasts they listen to, and if they belonged to groups such as QAnon or antifa.
After they made it through that process, attorneys for Trump and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg were able to grill the prospective jurors to dig further for hints of bias in favor of or against the former president. Attorneys for both parties had a limited number of opportunities to dismiss prospective jurors without explanation, and beyond that, they could also make cases to Merchan that he should dismiss others.
No jurors were selected on Monday. By the end of Tuesday, seven were chosen.
Merchan does not hold trials on Wednesdays, but when the trial resumed on Thursday, the day began with a loss of two jurors. One of them said she was worried about remaining impartial and was also concerned that major media outlets had reported personal details about her that caused family and colleagues to realize she had been selected.
Her concerns prompted Merchan to direct the media to curtail reporting physical features of the jurors and their places of employment, stating that it had become a problem.
By the end of Thursday, seven more jurors and one alternate were chosen.
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Merchan indicated Friday that the jury would be in position in the courtroom on Monday and would begin its work by hearing opening arguments from both parties about the case.
Bragg, an elected Democrat, charged Trump with 34 counts of falsifying business records in connection to alleged hush money payments made to two women ahead of the 2016 presidential election. The former president has pleaded not guilty to the charges and denounced the case as a form of political “persecution” and election interference.
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