The memo has gone out to alert Democrats that part of the plan to vilify and delegitimize the candidacy of Donald Trump is to constantly refer to him as a “34 times convicted felon,” or just “convicted felon” for short. The former is a deceitful description, though I’d guess 99% of those using it have no idea what Trump was charged with in the infamous “hush money” trial. In an egregious example of over-charging, Alvin Bragg’s lackeys turned a single misdemeanor into 34 felony counts, a slimy prosecutorial tactic but unfortunately a common one. But even “convicted felon” is misleading. A conviction in New York (and just about everywhere else) isn’t final until appeals have been exhausted and the defendant is sentenced. Neither has taken place yet in Trump’s case, and since the trial was as much of a partisan contrived travesty of justice as the charges, the smart money is on all those convictions being reversed.
Meanwhile, New York still operates under the common law doctrine of abatement ab intio, which holds that if a convicted individual dies before his or her appeals have been exhausted, the convictions no longer stand. That means, then, that if the aspiring assassin who shot the former President in the ear had killed Trump, he would have also rendered him innocent of those “34 charges.”
Trump would have been vindicated! Dead, but vindicated..
Ethics Alarms 
And THIS, ladies and gentlemen, in case you were wondering, is what they mean when they tell you during orientation that “law school will get you to think like a lawyer!”
I am waiting to see what happens with the appeal. I was skeptical of the ‘presidential immunity defense’ for this, but after watching an analysis, it makes more sense. As part of the prosecutorial strategy to just smear Trump and make him look sleazy, Bragg included a bunch of Presidential memos, e-mails, Tweets, etc from when Trump was president. Now, that shouldn’t have been relevant to the case, they were just to show that he is ‘mean’. However, they are now a significant part of the prosecution’s case. Much of the rest of the prosecution’s evidence also wasn’t relevant (Stormy Daniel’s testimony, for example), so a reasonable person couldn’t exclude all the irrelevant material as meaningless to the verdict. That doesn’t mean that the appellate court will see it that way.
Is this the appellate court he is appealing to? I saw a link to this and I am still not sure if I am being punked on this or not. It is historic. You can only get this randomly 0.00008% of the time or less.
https://www.nycourts.gov/courts/ad1/PDFs/First%20all%20African%20American%20bench.pdf
Yep. Ken Lay of Enron fame “died” while his federal convictions were on appeal to the Fifth Circuit. The feds had to release all of his assets frozen to as a result of the charges.
I do find it odd that he “died” within 5 minutes of a plastic surgery center in Denver, CO, was cremated the very next day and memorial services were held in Soa Paolo, Brazil (I made that part up).
I wonder what his widow is doing these days . . .
jvb
Assisted suicide? Kept the life insurance policies in force? Amazing. Good plot for a novel.
Whoa! Even better yet. He’s living in South America? Yikes. Paraguay? Hah!
Howse about a body switcheroo like that of Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner) and Kimberly Zimmers’ Mary Ann Simpson ala Body Heat
PWS
Yahoo News has an interesting tactic, one I”ve seen before
Second paragraph:
“The decision by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump nominee (bold, mine), comes on the first day of the Republican National Convention and two days after what the FBI says was an assassination attempt on the former president at a Pennsylvania campaign rally over the weekend.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-scores-major-legal-win-after-judge-tosses-classified-documents-case-against-him-heres-why-it-was-dismissed-and-whats-next-191359946.html
That’s right, the article makes certain to point out that the judge is a Trump nominee, allowing the Democrats and their allies in the news media and other industries to produce Talking Points shared by your Trump-Deranged Facebook friends and mine. To them, the decision will have nothing to do with the Constitution, but with a Trump crony doing his bidding.
Oh, this is interesting. You may have heard of Aaron Hernandez, who was a tight end for the New England Patriots. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to life without parole in Massachusetts. The team also voided his contract and refused to pay the balance of the guaranteed salary they owed him.
Well, Hernandez committed suicide in prison in 2017, and under the doctrine of Abatement ab initio a Massachusetts judge ordered his conviction vacated. That much I already knew.
What I didn’t know is that prosecutors appealed the ruling to the Massachusetts Supreme Court and it voided the vacated conviction in 2019. It also stated that the trial record would note that his conviction was “neither affirmed nor reversed”, and furthermore ended the practice of Abatement ab initio in Massachusetts. There was also a wrongful death suit from the family of his victim, and I have no idea what happened with that.
So I guess it was a good thing, so to speak, or would have been a good thing had he been killed, that Trump was convicted in New York and not Massachusetts.
Now now, use my tags, they take me a lot of time to set. If you click on the “abatement ab initio” tag under the post, it takes you right to an EA post about Hernandez.
I think your post is where I’d heard of the doctrine originally. However, I didn’t know that the decision had been overturned and the doctrine abandoned by the Mass. Supreme Court a couple years later.
I’ve come to believe the democrats have concluded the only way they can retain power after November is to assassinate Trump, and they’ll try again. Also, regarding those 34 felonies, can Jack or anyone tell me exactly what crimes Trump has been convicted of? It seems some accomplished legal minds (Jonathan Turley and Alan Dershowitz, to name a couple) still have no idea of exactly what Trumps been found guilty of.
He was convicted of business fraud to further another crime. Each count represents an individual check written to reimburse Michael Cohen. Each check is considered the “business record” falsely recorded as a “legal expense” rather than as a “legal settlement” with Ms. Stephanie Clifford.
The other crime purported to be furthered by the false business records was never specified.
I’m certainly no lawyer, but perhaps this is why the aforementioned legal experts don’t see the crime. After all, when you cut a check to pay your lawyer, that is normally considered a legal expense. Isn’t it?
I was frankly shocked when I read the indictment. Each was just a paragraph long, repeated 33 times with only the date changed. This is the entirety of the crime: