On May 30, 2024, a jury in a New York courtroom read the verdict, convicting the former President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Trump ‘s lawyers will appeal the case and the decision will likely get overturned by a higher court. This decision should get overturned because it represents one of the biggest travesties of justice ever to come out of an American courtroom.

I call this a travesty of justice because nobody, not even the judge, knows what crime Donald Trump supposedly committed. Judge Juan M. Merchan, who oversaw the case, never required the jury to articulate the crime or even agree on what statute was broken. The way that the New York statute is written is so vague that it allows jurors to pick from a list of crimes without any common agreement about which part of the statute was violated or how it was violated. To the contrary, federal law requires jurors to agree unanimously about which part of the law was broken and how it was broken. So, Donald Trump stands on firm grounds to make his appeal.

Judge Juan M. Merchan should have recused himself from this case. In 2020 Judge Merchan made political contributions to the campaign of Joe Biden. The size of the donations does not matter. The issue is that Merchan is a financier of Donald Trump’s political opponent, and that fact alone reveals his bias as well as the need for him to have recused himself. Making matters even worse is the fact that Merchan’s daughter, Loren, is a political activist who has worked for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

The situation is no better for the New York District Attorney who prosecuted the case against Donald Trump. Alvin Bragg had campaigned on the promise that he would prosecute Donald Trump. Consequently, Bragg never set out to prosecute an alleged crime; instead, he set out to fulfill a campaign promise to persecute a man.

The trial against Donald Trump was a nothing short of a kangaroo court. For example, Judge Merchan led the jury to convict Donald Trump by issuing the jurors 55 pages of instructions and reading all 55 pages of instructions to the members of the jury…twice! Moreover, some of those instructions contained some very bad advice for making decisions in a court case.

Judge Merchan advised the jury to use bad logic. For instance, here is how judge Merchan instructed the jury in how to draw an inference: “…suppose you go to bed one night when it is not raining and when you wake up in the morning, you look out your window; you do not see rain, but you see that the street and sidewalk are wet, and that people are wearing raincoats and carrying umbrellas. Under those circumstances, it may be reasonable to infer, that is conclude, that it rained during the night.”

Judge Merchan instructed the jury to reason with a false dilemma! I say this because it could have turned out to be the case that the weatherman had forecasted rain for the day, causing people to wear raincoats and carry umbrellas, and your neighbor’s broken sprinkler head could have just finished watering the lawn five minutes ago making the grass, the street, and the sidewalk all wet. This is no small matter to consider because in Donald Trump’s case, the prosecution’s star witness, Michael Cohen, was a convicted liar and a disbarred lawyer with a vendetta against Trump and who left the jury with a strong impression of guilt for Donald Trump. Moreover, Judge Merchan had effectively shut down the testimony of Brad Smith, Trump’s expert witness on elections, who could have validated Trump’s side of the story.

History will eventually record that what happened last Thursday in that New York courtroom was a travesty of justice. Indeed, it was a very dark day in our nation’s history. What happened to Donald Trump is the kind of weaponized justice we expect to see by tyrants who reign over people in third world countries, not in the United States of America where we pride ourselves on judging people with fairness, honesty and equity. Here in Nebraska, I like to think that we set higher standards for justice. For example, our state motto is: “Equality under the Law.”