Inside One ‘Egregious’ Mistake From Trump’s Florida Judge Aileen Cannon
Judge Aileen Cannon barely has any courtroom experience, but in her limited time on the bench she appears to have flouted hundreds of years of legal tradition—just because.
Jose Pagliery
Political Investigations ReporterPublished Aug. 11, 2023 4:58AM EDT
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, whose pro-Trump bias and head-turning errors have raised questions about whether she should be overseeing former President Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Florida, made what appears to be another surprising mistake last year.
Now, a defense lawyer is seizing on her misstep to try freeing his client from prison—even though he was caught on tape violently throwing a courtroom chair at a prosecutor and threatening to kill him.
The blunder was simple and entirely avoidable. The federal judge told jurors they could find the man, Christopher Wilkins, “guilty or not guilty.” But then she handed jurors a verdict form that didn’t even have those options.
“How far does somebody have to go to school to say that a verdict form is supposed to say guilty and not guilty?” asked defense lawyer Jeffrey Garland. “That would be one of the more egregious versions of jury instruction error… it’s such a rare error.”
Garland formally filed an appeal on Thursday and hopes to overturn a case that’s as black-and-white as they come—on a technicality.
“This is the judge’s deal. This is nobody else’s deal. I’m gonna tell ya, I’ve done a lot of appeals, and I’ve got a pretty good winning record. This is a great issue,” he said. “For a guy who’s on tape throwing a chair in court, it’s pretty ‘not good’ behavior. It would have been simple. You have a trial, properly instruct a jury, give them a form, and the jury’s gonna do what the jury’s gonna do.”
Cannon’s short and controversial history on the bench is under a microscope, given that she is presiding over such an historic criminal trial: that of a former president facing prison time for mishandling classified records at Mar-a-Lago and lying to the feds in a coverup. Trump himself appointed her in his final months in office, yet she has not recused herself from the case.
Cannon first came to people’s attention last year, when Trump’s lawyers were chastened by a judge who accused them of trying to game the judicial assignment system in a brazen attempt to have her oversee a conspiracy-laden lawsuit against political rival Hillary Clinton.
But she gained notoriety when Trump sued to block the feds from investigating Mar-a-Lago and she was oddly assigned the case, despite being in a distant corner of the district far from Trump’s mansion. Cannon immediately began to issue bizarre orders that froze the investigation—until appellate judges told her to back off. A court screwup even exposed how she was bending over backwards to appease the man who appointed her.
But now she’s come under fire over her inexperience.
Last month, The New York Times discovered that Cannon has only handled four trials, collectively accounting for just 14 days in court—less than three weeks of experience before handling a potential turning point for American democracy. Last week, Reuters exposed how Cannon kept family members of an accused viewer of child sex abuse locked out of her courtroom during some of his trial in June, violating his Sixth Amendment rights to have a public trial—and somehow forgot to swear in the prospective jury pool, the most basic of mandatory procedures.
Now, The Daily Beast can confirm that Cannon made yet another round of gaffes during a two-day trial.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-other-judge-aileen-cannon-case-with-eerie-similarities-to-trump
First the backstory: Wilkins, who had already served time behind bars, ran into problems while at a halfway house and got caught with guns. When a Fort Lauderdale jury eventually read his guilty verdict on the evening of Nov. 7, 2019, an enraged Wilkins grabbed his chair in the courtroom and flung it at the prosecutor across the room while yelling, “I’ll kill you when I catch you, boy!” A video camera and court reporter’s audio device recorded it all.
Fast-forward three years, and Wilkins found himself in court again, this time before Judge Cannon, for attacking the federal prosecutor.
