(Big League Politics) – Alan Dershowitz, a lawyer and former professor at Harvard Law School, has said the Derek Chauvin case should’ve been declared a mistrial over Congresswoman Maxine Waters’ public remarks in which she demanded the jury meet her desired outcome, or the mob would need to get ‘more confrontational.’
Dershowitz appeared Tuesday on Grant Stinchfield’s Newsmax TV program while the jury deliberated on Chauvin’s verdict.
“The judge should’ve granted the motion for a mistrial based on the efforts of congresswoman Waters to influence the jury,” he said. “Her message was clearly intended to get to the jury: ‘If you acquit, or if you find a charge less than murder, we will burn down your buildings, we will burn down your businesses, we will attack you.’ […] This was an attempt to intimidate the jury.”
Dershowitz then likened Waters’ remarks to KKK-style intimidation:
“It’s borrowed precisely from the Ku Klux Klan of the 1930s and the 1920s, when the Klan would march outside of courthouses and threaten all kinds of reprisals if the jury ever dared convict a white person or acquit a black person.
“And so, efforts to intimidate a jury should result in a mistrial. But the judge of course wouldn’t grant a mistrial because then he’d be responsible for the riots that would ensue, even though it was Waters who was responsible.”
Waters’ out-of-bounds comments came Saturday during a march protesting the police shooting of Daunte Wright in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Center. Waters represents a congressional district in California.
“We’ve got to stay in the streets, and we’ve got to demand justice,” she said. “I am hopeful that we will get a verdict that says, ‘guilty, guilty, guilty,’ and if we don’t, we cannot go away. We’ve got to get more confrontational.”
Waters got what she hoped for, as Derek Chauvin was found guilty on all three counts levied against him. A major misconception of the trial is that the jury was sequestered and therefore could not have been influenced by remarks from Waters and others. This is false; each juror was able to return home at night and only entered sequestration to deliberate on the verdict, which only lasted ten hours.
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