Hunter Biden Offers to Plead Guilty In His Tax Fraud Case -- But Only If He's Permitted to DENY All Wrongdoing

So he'll plead guilty while simultaneously maintaining his innocence?

I betcha he'll get his way.

He was charged in December as part of a wide-ranging probe of his finances and business dealings, becoming the first child of a sitting president to face criminal charges.

In the Los Angeles federal court where his trial was due to take place, Biden sought to enter what is known as an "Alford plea," an usual type of guilty plea where a defendant does not admit to the allegations against them.

Unusual, you meant, AP. Great "multiple layers of painstaking editorial fact-checking."

U.S. Justice Department prosecutors in the courtroom said they would not accept that plea. Federal prosecutors generally only agree to Alford pleas in rare circumstances, where they have approval from high-level officials.

The "Alford plea" kinda-sorta got blessed retroactively. A killer named Alford pled guilty to second-degree murder to avoid being convicted of death-penalty-eligible first-degree murder. He later tried to overturn his conviction, saying he had only pled guilty to avoid the death penalty but had always been innocent. The Supreme Court rejected his efforts, saying that if he was informed of the consequences of his plea by a capable lawyer, and still pled guilty, he was stuck with that plea, even if he maintained his innocence.

Having thus been blessed as a plea after-the-fact -- mostly just to shut up a jailhouse lawyer spamming out reasons he should be released -- such "Alford pleas" are now accepted in most jurisdictions, but are rare. You acknowledge that the prosecution has enough evidence to convict you, while remaining resolutely coy about whether that evidence actually proves your guilt.

Shipwreckedcrew @shipwreckedcrew

Alford pleas require DOJ consent.

In 21 years at DOJ I never heard of a case where DOJ consented.

DOJ policy is that for a defendant to plead guilty, the defendant must make a factual admission of guilt.

DOJ policy is to not allow someone to plead "guilty" while not admitting factual guilt.

Hunter wants to enter an Alford plea for a simple reason: He knows, with near-certainty, he is not going to be sentenced to anything more than 100 hours of community service or something like that, and even that will be erased by a pardon from his father.

The princelings of the Regime do not go to prison, ever.

So the only real penalty he's in danger of receiving is the public exposure of his crimes and many, many lies to cover-up those crimes. (As well as the implication that his father has been protecting him through his long, long history of notorious crimes.)

And he wants to avoid that. So sure he'll accept a guilty plea knowing he'll face no actual sentence for it, so long as he avoids the one "punishment" he actually might suffer, the punishment of having his crimes be publicly acknowledged and all his years of lying exposed as the whining of a privileged princeling crackhead who has skated all of his life on family connections.

There's a cute little wrinkle to an Alford plea. You probably know that Hunter Biden is suing, in purest of bad faith, all of the people who have accurately and justly called him a serial criminal.

Well, if a court accepts an Alford plea, you have not officially admitted you're a criminal, so you can continue asserting your innocence in other legal cases, like civil lawsuits for defamation.

The Minnesota Supreme Court first explored the collateral consequences of an Alford plea in a civil trial in Doe 136 v. Liebsch, 872 N.W.2d 875 (Minn. 2015). In its decision, the Minnesota Supreme Court recognized that the district court had broad discretion to determine whether to admit evidence of the Alford plea in a subsequent civil trial. Though the court acknowledged that a conviction based on an Alford plea generally carries the same penalties and collateral consequences as a conventional guilty plea, it emphasized the fact that it had never stated that a district court must admit a guilty plea as evidence in subsequent civil matter. Further, it found that the district court enjoys broad discretion to determine whether to admit evidence under Rule 403. Thus, it determined that the district court did not abuse its discretion when it excluded the Alford plea based on 403 grounds.

That is, the other party was not permitted to introduce the highly relevant evidence that the Alford-pleading party had already accepted punishment for his crime (albeit without admitting he'd committed the crime).

He'd get his get-out-of-jail free card plus the right to continue suing all of his accusers, because he didn't technically acknowledge his guilt.

Is that how it works, Huntie? You're a lawyer, supposedly -- tell me, is that how it works? We accept plea offers from criminals who continue insisting they're innocent and that we have no just basis for punishing them?

And then we let them sue people calling them criminals, allowing them to maintaining their perfectly-fictitious "innocence" in other court cases?

Like I said, I bet this is how it all winds up working for "Huntie," the absolutely most-privileged rich, useless, legacy white man the world has ever known.

PS NeverTrump is fighting to preserve "our precious normzzzzzzz."

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 03:20 PM

| Access Comments