Extremely glad to have lost my bet on this one.

Followup market:

Can't believe I missed it!

@Joshua People were rather late to NO on mistrial, I decided to leave some room for others.

@ZviMowshowitz I got a small piece of the mistrial action, but I was hesitant to dump my whole balance into it because I thought there must be something I'm missing... unknown unknowns and all that

lolllllll

@DanMan314 *convicted felon.

All 34 counts

The fact that they got a verdict this fast screams 'guilty' to me. Hard to imagine unanimous consent that he's innocent after this short a time, at least from how it seems to me.

@Joshua Only the highest quality epistemics for this jury. I expect Merchan will follow up with a robust discussion of conservation of expected evidence.

@DanMan314 once they ask for a paper copy of the Sequences, then we'll know this ain't resolving within a week

@DanMan314 My insider sources tell me there's a fierce schism in the jury between Bayesians and Frequentists.

The Jury is now deliberating.

This market is off the true odds because I think that many of the people betting on this market have not served on a jury before.

I served on one, and it was sort of high-profile, and what you find is that cases that go to trial are always incredibly close. Otherwise, it would have been settled, dismissed, or pled out beforehand. A trial costs hundreds of thousands (or, in Trump's case, millions) of dollars to conduct.

Except in a death penalty case where there is nothing to lose by going to trial, I don't think that the odds of conviction should ever be above even. Compromise and split verdicts are more likely than not.

The most likely outcome of this trial will be a compromise verdict. The jury will have great incentive to not hang, because they don't want others to be the people who end up deciding this case. But the prosecution's case is not strong enough to convict on the felony counts, as it relies on Cohen's testimony, which is completely discredited given that he contradicted himself on the stand in this trial alone.

So, there will probably be a split compromise verdict - definitely no felony convictions. The jurors who want to convict would rather settle for some convictions rather than a complete mistrial. I predict some misdemeanor convictions and some acquittals or mistrials, which results in trivial penalties and propels Trump to the Presidency.

@SteveSokolowski We've got a market on felony vs misdemeanor!

@SteveSokolowski thoughts on the outcome?

@braulios I don't think the evidence supported a straight guilty verdict. I agree that the counts regarding the checks that Trump actually signed were significant evidence of his guilt, but the other counts relied too heavily on Cohen's testimony.

I think that Cohen has committed perjury so many times that his word was useless, and therefore I would have pressed for a split verdict, acquitting on the business records that Trump didn't see, as there was no credible direct evidence that Trump himself told anyone to create the false accounting entries.

@SteveSokolowski Sometimes a jury assumes that everyone is lying, because they are, yet they still have the responsibility of making a determination based on the facts presented.

Cohen didn't have the dalliance with the porn star that necessitated those payments and Cohen wasn't running for public office necessitating additional discretion in accounting for those payments. Cohen was the employee of a man who, by all historical evidence, always demands complete control over every organization he leads. Trump has complete control over the Republican party. Trump attempted to assert complete control over the federal government.

I think Trump could have made a better case for himself but even he thought it was impossible and said so to the press outside the courtroom. I think he got as fair a trial as he's ever going to get.

@becauseyoudo I'm not sure I would say he got a fair trial, because of the problems in New York law with the jury instructions.

It's ludicrous that there are 55 pages of jury instructions and the jurors don't get a copy. In almost every other state and in the Federal government, a copy of the jury instructions is printed in the deliberations room. Sometimes, the verdict form asks questions based on the jury instructions.

Reasonable doubt, at least how I used it in cases in the past, is whether there is an alternate explanation that could explain what happened. In the case of the checks, there isn't any alternate explanation. Trump actually saw the checks and signed them.

In the case of the other records, the alternate explanation is that Cohen or the other convicted criminals involved in the scheme took it upon themselves to falsify the business records to cover up their own involvement, and that Trump, as President, was busy doing things the President did. The prosecutors couldn't eliminate this alternate explanation, which is reasonable doubt.

If this were a civil trial, I would certainly say there is a preponderance of the evidence that Trump is more likely than not to have known about those records, but there is an alternate explanation here.

@SteveSokolowski Trump's defense did not provide a reasonable alternative explanation. Attacking Cohen's character without uncovering the conspiracy you're describing isn't an alternative explanation.

@becauseyoudo I think you're misunderstanding the way the law works, though. The defense doesn't have to provide an alternate explanation. They don't even have to mount a defense at all.

That's why we acquitted Becker in the Penn State fraternity hazing case. We were never able to actually figure out any reasonable explanation at all of what happened. The defense's lawyer didn't make any sense either, but that was insufficient to result in a conviction. And, as I believed after watching the news later, that was exactly what she was trying to do - simply make everything as confusing as possible.

That's exactly what Trump's lawyers were trying to do here. They just tried to make everything into a farce with everything being too confusing to make sense of, which is sufficient under the jury instructions to acquit.

We might disagree on whether the facts were proven, but I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the defense's role.

@SteveSokolowski Except they didn't succeed in making everything too confusing for the jury to make sense of. As I understand it, the role of the defense is not making themselves transparent to the jury in their attempts to muddle and confuse the prosecution's evidence.

Unless your theory is that Trump wanted to be convicted? It's worked out for him with $35m in donations so far today.