A case with 19 defendants including a ex-President IS gonna be a Hot Mess to try…..
Already people are trying to bail out to the Federal Courts for better chances…..
“You need a spreadsheet to keep track of it all,” said Caren Morrison, a former federal prosecutor now at Georgia State University’s law school….
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Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D) is known for her use of the Georgia Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute to prosecute complex cases. Georgia’s law is more expansivethan the federal RICO statute and, like the federal version, includes stiff penalties of up to 20 years in prison.
Nearly all of the defendants have hired their own teams of lawyers, who will file separate pleadings and generate a busy court calendar of hearings. And scheduling could become difficult, as Trump has been indicted in three other criminal cases, including a federal election-interference case and another alleging that he criminally mishandled classified documents after his presidency….
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Even as former President Donald J. Trump and his 18 co-defendants in the Georgia election interference case turned themselves in one by one at an Atlanta jail this week, their lawyers began working to change how the case will play out.
They are already at odds over when they will have their day in court, but also, crucially, where. Should enough of them succeed, the case could split into several smaller cases, perhaps overseen by different judges in different courtrooms, running on different timelines.
Five defendants have already sought to move the state case to federal court, citing their ties to the federal government. The first one to file — Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff during the 2020 election — will make the argument for removal on Monday, in a hearing before a federal judge in Atlanta.
Federal officials charged with state crimes can move their cases to federal court if they can convince a judge that they are being charged for actions connected to their official duties, among other things….
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In the Georgia case, the question of whether to change the venue — a legal maneuver known as removal — matters because it would affect the composition of a jury. If the case stays in Fulton County, Ga., the jury will come from a bastion of Democratic politics where Mr. Trump was trounced in 2020. If the case is removed to federal court, the jury will be drawn from a 10-county region of Georgia that is more suburban and rural — and somewhat more Trump-friendly. Because it takes only one not-guilty vote to hang a jury, this modest advantage could prove to be a very big deal.
The coming fights over the proper venue for the case are only one strand of a complicated tangle of efforts being launched by a gaggle of defense lawyers now representing Mr. Trump and the 18 others named in the 98-page racketeering indictment. This week, the lawyers clogged both state and federal court dockets with motions that will also determine when the case begins….