Donald Trump Deserves a Fair Trial

Donald Trump has always played to courts of public opinion. But now he faces judgment in courts of law, under very different rules. His critics and opponents celebrate this moment and the prosecutors responsible for it, believing that the criminal-justice system’s standards and procedures will emphatically limit Trump’s ability to lie, to demagogue, and, above all, to escape responsibility. Trump, it’s often said, enjoys no greater or lesser latitude than any other criminal defendant. One wonders if Trump himself truly understands what that entails.

But do Trump’s opponents truly understand it either?

The criminal-justice system is built from the ground up to protect defendants’ rights, even while seeking to punish them. The canonical account of our criminal-justice system, after all, is : “For in 1770, “because it’s of more importance to community, that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt should be punished.”