I see the arguments on both sides. The fact is that if you support the guy, you’ll see reasons to not jail him for a bond violation. If you don’t, you’ll see reasons to jail him.
What I haven’t seen any of the news organizations do is link to the actual Motion To Revoke Bond document, review the terms of the bond release, and compare it to the specific examples.
But that’s why I’m here! To cut through all the BULLSHIT and let you know how it really is.
Here’s the Motion to Revoke Bond.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24168746-harrison-floyd-bond-revoke
The important info is the bond conditions on pages 20-21. Among other things irrelevant to this issue are the following conditions.
- (5) The Defendant shall perform no act to intimidate any person known to him to be a codefendant or witness in this case or to otherwise obstruct the administration of justice.
- (6) The Defendant shall not communicate in any way, directly or indirectly, about the facts of this case with any person known to him or her to be a codefendant in this case except through his or her counsel.
- (7) The Defendant shall not communicate in any way, directly or indirectly, about the facts of this case with any person known to him or her to be a witness in this case except through his or her counsel.
It’s important to remember that when a bond is revoked, it has nothing to do with right and wrong. It’s not about freedom or personal rights. It’s about an agreement made between the prosecutor of a case, and the defendant who has already been arrested and charged.
Click here for a short and simplified refresher on how our Justice system works.
So to review where we are on the case:
1.) Donald Trump was reported by the head of the justice department in Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, to have possibly committed the crime of election interference.
2.) The Prosecutor, Fanni Willis, spent a year investigating the claim and discovered enough evidence that she felt that charges were warranted against a number of people, and charged the entire group with Racketeering as a group and each with a variety of charges depending on the specific laws each appeared to have broken.
3.) She put together all of the evidence that she believed would spell out, beyond a shadow of doubt, that would be enough to convince every juror in a trial, into a request to proceed and sent it to a Grand Jury.
4.) A Grand Jury or citizens generated from a random list of eligible voters was presented with this information and after nearly three months of reviewing it all very carefully, determined that the case would likely result in conviction and charges were justified for those that were charged.
5.) As a result of the Grand Jury’s findings, those people were charged as they indicated. They were arrested and appeared before a judge to enter a plea of guilty or not guilty.
6.) A plea of not guilty by default puts a person into jail where they are held until trial. However, a judge can at their discretion, release a defendant during the interim under whatever conditions they feel are necessary to protect all parties involved. The limits rest anywhere between what they would experience in jail and total freedom. These conditions are listed in the release documents.
If a judge decided that house-arrest was warranted, they could do that. If they decided that they should be denied access to electronic devices, they could do that. This is often done with hackers that are released on bond. The judge would have been well within his purview to stipulate that none of the defendants on bond use any form of electronic media and not appear on any broadcast programs at all. Neither the prosecution, nor the judge chose to do so but they could have and this debate wouldn’t be happening.
So going back to the case, number 5 is questionable. It says he “shall perform no act to intimidate (codefendants). If this was the only item he was up against, he would likely be in the clear. Number 6 however is explicit. He cannot talk about the facts of the case to anyone except is attorney…not even indirectly. So each and every item he’s posted to social media or talked about to the press has violated item number 6 and should result in him being in jail until his trial. By also tagging other witnesses in the case, he has also violated number 7.
Had this been anyone else, for any other crime, this man would be in jail. If he was on bail pending a trial for beating up his girlfriend and had tagged her on Twitter in a horrifying video of domestic abuse, saying “This is what real spouse abuse looks like.”, he would be in jail and no one would question it. He would simply stay there until the trial.
In the trial, he could make his case and point out all the flaws to the jury. That’s where the matter should be determined. NOT in the public media space of soundbites.
Will he be jailed?
Probably not. The Trump campaign does all they can to discredit the prosecutor and all others involved in the eyes of the public and the judge has to weigh the damage to the country as a whole if he should be skewed as being unfair. So this will likely go with a warning and some tighter restrictions. This is a good thing. The trial is a long way off and given their activity, there will be more of this. Each step in this direction, while not stopping the nonsense, solidifies the fairness of the court and reduces the chance of being able to win an appeal or claim mistrial.