From the original jury pool summoned for the hush money trial of former President Donald Trump, more than half of the candidates were excused because they admitted bias towards Trump and couldn’t remain impartial.
On Thursday, the jury selection process continued with one step forward and another step back with an already sworn in juror being dismissed because their identity may have been compromised.
“Juror Number Two” was dismissed on Thursday after reports say she told the New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan that she was unable to “let the outside influences not affect me in the courtroom.”
“I definitely have concerns now… about being in public. Yesterday alone, I had friends, colleagues push things to my phone questioning my identity as a juror. I don’t believe at this point that I can be fair and unbiased and let the outside influences not affect my decision to be in the courtroom,” she said to Judge Merchan.
“Thank you. I’m sorry,” the Judge answered. “You’re excused.”
The judge was extremely disappointed and said “we’ve just lost what probably could have been a very big juror in this case,” claiming she was “very intimidated by the press.”
“There’s a reason why this is an anonymous jury and we’re taking the measures that were taken. And it kind of defeats the purpose of that when so much information is put out there that it is very, very easy for us to identify who the jurors are,” the judge explained.
According to NBC News, “Prosecutors, meanwhile, said they now had questions about another of the jurors who’d been sworn in. The person said in their questionnaire that neither he nor a family member had been accused of a crime, but Joshua Steinglass of the Manhattan district attorney’s office discovered that somebody with the same name had been arrested in the 1990s for tearing down political posters and was also involved in a corruption inquiry.”
The former president continues to claim that he couldn’t possibly receive a fair and impartial trial in New York City with so many potential jurors have hidden political agendas.