Courts

Trump Judge Aileen Cannon's Mistakes Just Keep On Piling On

See, this is why you want people with actual experience getting those lifetime appointments to the federal bench.

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Screen Shot 2022-09-16 at 1.29.58 PMHow great that knowledge of MAGA judge Aileen Cannon’s incompetence has grown beyond the confines of legal circles into the mainstream. Yay? And all it took to catch the public’s attention was debasing herself by inserting herself into the fight over the search warrant for top secret documents at Mar-a-Lago. You’ll recall Cannon threw jurisdictional requirements to the wind and embarked on a civil challenge as an endrun around a criminal investigation, and an all-conservative panel of the Eleventh Circuit gave her the business in an epic benchslap.

Anyway, now that the spotlight is on Cannon, attention is being paid to other judicial missteps she’s made in less high-profile cases. As reported by Reuters, despite her experience in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Cannon doesn’t seem to understand how jury trials work. That’s a real dilly of a pickle for a district court judge.

Florida-based U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon closed jury selection for the trial of an Alabama man — accused by federal prosecutors of running a website with images of child sex abuse — to the defendant’s family and the general public, a trial transcript obtained by Reuters showed. A defendant’s right to a public trial is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution’s Sixth Amendment.

Cannon, a 42-year-old former federal prosecutor appointed by Trump to the bench in 2020 late in his presidency, also neglected to swear in the prospective jury pool — an obligatory procedure in which people who may serve on the panel pledge to tell the truth during the selection process. This error forced Cannon to re-start jury selection before the trial ended abruptly with defendant William Spearman pleading guilty as part of an agreement with prosecutors.

As law professor Stephen Smith at the Santa Clara School of Law said, she made a “a fundamental constitutional error.” “She ignored the public trial right entirely. It’s as though she didn’t know it existed.” Rut-roh.

And as Jeremy Fogel, a former federal judge who leads the Berkeley Judicial Institute in California, noted, the lack of experience is supercharged in high-profile cases, “A lack of experience can be really hard in a big case, especially when there’s all this media attention and everything you do is being watched and commented on and second-guessed.”

Good thing she only has a criminal trial of the former president of the United States on her docket. No pressure at all.

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Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Mastodon @Kathryn1@mastodon.social.

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