Justice delayed is justice denied. The delay of justice in cases that determine the criminality of a once and potential future president is as clear a failure as there is when it comes to what we ought to expect of our judiciary. At the state and federal level alike, the courts former President Donald Trump has found himself in are defined by scandal, partisanship, and a proclivity for procrastination such that it has unequivocally failed us by any reasonable measure.
In Georgia, Fani Willis has failed us by not ensuring that the trials against Donald Trump will be held before the 2024 election. She first failed us by waiting longer than was merited to bring charges against Trump. While the wheels of justice notoriously grind slowly, a case of this magnitude surely warranted expedited action that Willis was either unable or unwilling to deliver, which in either instance is a mark of failure. Moreover, by sleeping with a subordinate on this case, Willis has failed us by giving Trump an avenue for pre-trial appeal, which guarantees that the trial cannot begin before the presidential election in November.
In New York, the one instance where Trump has faced trial for his alleged criminal behavior, he was convicted of 34 felonies. Even so, here again we see that undue delay dragged this ordeal out by years. As far back as 2022, prosecutors working the case resigned in disgust at the district attorney's initial refusal to pursue charges.
The New York case ought to make one all the more despondent about our judiciary when you consider that Cyrus Vance, Alvin Bragg's predecessor in the district attorney's office, remains bewildered as to why charges for more serious financial crimes were never pursued. Evidence of these crimes abounds, with the Trump Organization itself, along with its former CFO, having been found guilty of tax fraud. Trump's company has also been ordered in civil court to pay back hundreds of millions in ill gotten gains stemming from years of blatant fraud. All this, yet a handful of charges for fraudulent business records in a porn actress payoff scheme was the best criminal case Bragg could muster. Bragg's convictions may have been a deserved and successful prosecution, but it was nevertheless a failure of justice in that far more serious crimes were obviously committed by Trump.
In the two federal cases against Trump, we now find that judges are continually giving him every manner of opportunity to ensure that any trial will be pushed beyond the November election, meaning these cases will disappear overnight if he is re-elected.
At Trump's trial for unlawful possession of classified materials in Florida, Judge Aileen Cannon has been purposefully acting to keep the case moving at a glacial pace. She has most recently been engaging in astoundingly dilatory tactics by giving time for outside lawyers who are not even affiliated with the case to make oral arguments in her court about Jack Smith's lawful appointment as special counsel. Even before this, Cannon had already postponed the trial indefinitely in as as clear a sign as any that Trump will not be tired in her courtroom before November.
Judge Tanya Chutkan, overseeing the Washington, D.C., case, was moving things along at a reasonable speed and gave every indication that a trial was imminent only to see the Supreme Court take up an absurd pre-trial appeal to consider whether presidents are immune from ordering the murder of their rivals, the selling of the nation's nuclear secrets for personal gain, or for attempting to pull off a coup.
Nobody should be surprised that the Supreme Court is entertaining such frighteningly frivolous appeals, as that once storied institution has become the epitome of the judiciary having failed us. Even setting aside the Court's newfound penchant for obliterating precedent for nakedly partisan purposes on issues like abortion and affirmative action, we have now begun to see multiple conservative justices stop trying to even erect a veneer of impartiality or respectability.
Let us first take Justice Clarence Thomas, who is steeped in financial scandals, which are tenfold the scope of those that have lead to the resignation of Supreme Court justices in the past. Meanwhile, Thomas' wife attended the Jan. 6Stop the Steal rally in Washington. D.C., and was waging a multi-front pressure campaign against state and federal officials to help Trump overturn the election.
Justice Samuel Alito has also been the recipient of lavish trips funded by billionaires with business before the Court. We've recently come to learn that Justice Alito, or his wife if we are to believe his painfully unconvincing explanations, was flying a U.S. flag upside down in the wake of the 2020 election in the same manner that was common among the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. Meanwhile, flying at Alito's vacation home was a Christian nationalist flag that is also deeply connected to the insurrection.
That either Supreme Court justice hasn't been pressured to resign or faced a serious threat of impeachment over their financial scandals alone is a de facto admission by Congress that these justices are untouchable because they consistently vote to deliver conservative victories to the GOP. Even more unsettling is that neither justice has so much as bothered to recuse themselves from any of the Jan. 6 related cases before the Court, despite the overwhelming evidence that their impartiality is reasonably in question on these matters. If the highest court in the land cannot meet even such low standards of ethical behavior, then there is no other conclusion to come to other than declaring that our judiciary has failed us.
Nicholas Creel is an assistant professor of business law at Georgia College and State University.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
