Last Thursday, Justice Juan Merchan issued a decision denying Donald Trump’s motion to dismiss the indictment brought by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg against Trump, and set a March 25 trial date. Merchan, who has previously presided over the criminal trials of the Trump Organization and its CFO Allen Weisselberg, occupies an unusual spot on the bench: He was neither elected to that role nor appointed to it by an elected official. He is designated only as an “acting” justice of the supreme court (the main trial court in New York), but he’s been an acting justice since 2009. His actual appointment, by then-governor David Paterson, was to the Court of Claims, which is not a criminal court (he was previously appointed by then-mayor Mike Bloomberg as a family-court judge). That’s due to a state-constitutional cap on the number of justices on the New York supreme court, which the governor and state legislature have for some time been evading by appointing judges to lesser courts and reassigning them.
Before becoming a judge, Merchan served in the office Bragg now runs, and then joined the New York attorney general’s office in 1999, when Eliot Spitzer took it over. He worked there until Spitzer was leaving office in 2006 to run for governor. His opinion on Bragg’s charges reads like something straight from the Spitzer playbook for vague, standardless laws and rule by political vendetta.
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