I honestly "try" to view things like this New York trial as if I am the one with bias

But it simply doesn't work when I honestly look at the facts.

There are times when I really try to see the other side of the argument and alas, it does come to me. Sometimes I figure that there may be a point being made that I am missing, because I might not want to acknowledge it. Other times I figure it is just a practical matter of what information we have and what information we are not hearing (or choosing not to hear). Someone is making a point they believe in, simply because they are limiting their information to hear only what they want to hear. I may reject it because I have "more" information. But at least I can understand the point.

The problem with the situation like the Trump trial is that generally speaking we want to believe in our justice system and we are not often (if ever) put in a position where judges are willing to show "clear bias" in their decisions. Rather we expect and believe that generally judges are at least honest and trying to be fair. Obviously Judge Ito (from the O.J. Simpson trial) caught some grief, but it was never suggested that he was corrupt. The issues with Ito were more about people who questioned his judicial skills in such a high profile case, just as they questioned Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden for putting on a weak prosecution and making some serious mistakes. There was never any indication that there was any fix or any corruption.

But this trial was different from the very start. If you had told me that the indictment that Alvin Bragg got and sheepishly reported to the public would eventually result in a conviction, I would have thought you to be crazy. Both sides of the aisle questioned the validity of the indictment as missing the key element of a second crime, and his responses at the time were almost apologetic. For some time, Bragg was telling everyone that in spite of being the first to indict, that he would allow the other cases to go first. He seemed almost as if he didn't really want to take the case to court. Then he got Judge Merchan assigned and everything started to fall into place.

What I can tell you is that for a trial where someone is convicted of a crime after only 10-11 hours of jury deliberations, that under any normal circumstances, you might expect that the public would be on board. But as it stands, most every poll is showing that barely a majority believe the jury got it correct, and that number falls with people who were paying the closest attention to it. I cannot really see how being outside of that small majority is about being a Trump apologist or about being a right wing partisan. When I heard even people on CNN and MSNBC provide all of the problems with the case and people from all sides questioning the decisions of the Judge, then I find it difficult that people are not hearing the same things I am hearing.

Of course, of the 50-55 percent who approve of the jury verdict, you have to accept that there is a significant portion of these people who really don't care if he was specifically guilty of what he was being charged with. They just believe that he has "escaped" justice for other things, and are okay with the idea that he may have been found guilty for something he technically didn't do. This is the reason that the prosecution framed this case as being about election interference (rather than falsification of business records) and why the defense was sort of forced by the Judge allowing this to defend something they should not have had to defend. Some defense attorneys suggested that the defense should have ignored all of that, but not sure that would have helped, given the makeup of the jury. From the questions that they asked of the judge and from the testimony that they asked to be read back, it seems obvious that they were looking at this as an election interference case (not a business records case). Maybe the defense did make a mistake in playing along? But I feel like ignoring what the judge was allowing the prosecution to argue would not have convinced these jurors that the prosecution and judge were both wrong. It would have looked like the defense was suggesting they had no defense. It was a no win situation.

It's easy to step back from this as and become simplistic. Oh, the jury found him guilty and they must be right is what some will do. I saw an article that suggested that Republicans were going from election denial to verdict denial? Of course, isn't that just rhetoric? It doesn't appear to be a real argument. Rather someone who is wanting to distance themselves from the actual arguments being put forward, and discounting them semantically.

For the life of me, I cannot see the honest appraisal that comes with the idea that he was actually guilty of 34 felonies because a bookkeeper took an invoice from an attorney and entered legal expenses into a bookkeeping program. I doubt I ever will... no matter how much I try.