Trump attorney John Lauro urges D.C. January 6 judge to give more time to look through 12 MILLION evidence documents – and says he was ‘ethically required’ to cite Scottsboro Boys case in his defense

Donald Trump attorney John Lauro says it was both appropriate and necessary for the president’s team to cite the infamous 1931 Scottsboro Boys case when they urged a federal judge to postpone Trump’s trial in Washington DC January 6 to be postponed.

Appearing in federal court on Monday on Trump’s behalf, Lauro called the case a “fundamental part” of a defendant’s right to representation — and said Trump’s team was “ethically obligated” to raise the case.

“We didn’t quote it as a statement that there was any factual similarity (between the cases) – just what the state of the law was,” he told DailyMailcom, calling it something a lawyer was “obliged” to do.

Lauro and other lawyers on Trump’s team quoted in the first paragraph of their filing this month from a Supreme Court ruling on the case, in which they argued that it would be nearly impossible to adequately process the millions of documents the government has turned over on time. to process. process.

“We have not referred to the factual basis. We just quoted what the state of the law was. And the state of the law is that everyone has the right to effective legal counsel,” Lauro said. “In that case (the Scottsboro Boys) there was certainly no effective help from counsel. But we argued by analogy that in the case of 12 million pages of documents, counsel needs time to prepare. But we had to cite that case.’

The comparison failed to go through the courts and drew criticism from commentators in the high-profile case, which is already being touted as one of the most important criminal cases in American history.

“We are obliged to quote the leading authority of the Supreme Court on the issue of the right to an attorney, and the most important case on the right to an attorney is Powell vs. Alabama, which is constitutionally binding in a court of law, and we were ethically obligated to cite that case as the most important Supreme Court case on the fundamental element of the right to an attorney under the Sixth Amendment. So we had an ethical obligation to quote leading case law,” said Lauro.

“So to suggest we did something stupid is just plain ridiculous,” he said, waving back a judge who denounced the decision in a TV interview.

He was referring to a comment by retired California Supreme Court Justice LaDoris Cordell called the decision a “stunningly stupid thing to do.” She called the move “absurd” in an appearance on CNN after the judge’s decision.

Lauro rejected the idea that “this was somehow racially motivated or that this was somehow a disagreement on the Scottsboro case, which is just not true.”

“This is something we had to do,” he said.

Chutkan, himself a former public defender appointed by President Barack Obama, in court Monday called Trump’s situation “deeply different” from the Scottsboro Boys case for “a number of reasons.”

The boys were “met in Scottsboro by a large crowd and the attitude of the community was one of great hostility,” she noted.

“This trial is not moving the case forward with the haste of the mob,” said Chutkan, who dismissed the analogy when announcing her decision, after hearing from Trump and administration lawyers.

Their trials “began six days after the indictment,” she said, noting that Trump was represented by “a team of diligent and experienced attorneys,” and said they had been given plenty of time to prepare.

The judge will have the final say in court, though Lauro stood up at the end of Monday’s hearing and said he didn’t believe he could provide his client with adequate representation with a trial date of May 4 — the day before Super Tuesday.

He told DailyMail.com that Chutkan “disapproved” of Trump being denied effective counsel assistance.but she was in no way offended by the fact that we brought up an important case about the right to a lawyer.’

He continues to argue that the task of pouring over what he has called an “avalanche” of material is a daunting task, with the number of documents prosecutors shared during the discovery process now running to more than 12 million.

The lawyers referred to the Scottsboro Boys case in the same case submit where they attempted to convey the magnitude of information in the case.

“Even if we could start reviewing the documents today, we would have to continue at a pace of 99,762 pages a day to complete the government’s initial production by the proposed jury selection date (in January). That is the entirety of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, from cover to cover, 78 times a day, every day, from now until the jury’s selection,” the dossier reads.

Prosecutors said this argument did not hold up, pointing to voluminous material for other complex cases.

The Scottsboro case, which received renewed attention in one of Trump’s many criminal trials, charged nine African-American boys with raping two white teenagers on an Alabama freight train.

They were tried just six days after the indictment and did not have time to choose their own lawyers. They were not charged until five days after their arrest. National Guardsmen had to remove them after a lynch mob formed. The first convictions came on the second day of the trial, and death sentences soon followed, in a brutal illustration of Jim Crow-era justice.

The Supreme Court overturned their conviction, ruling that they were denied the right to an attorney, in violation of their rights to a fair trial.