US President Joe Biden said on Monday, July 1, that the Supreme Court’s decision on Donald Trump’s criminal immunity for his actions as president set a “dangerous precedent.”
By a majority of six to three (conservative justices against progressives), the Court held that “the president enjoys no immunity for his unofficial acts” but that he “is entitled to at least a presumption of immunity for his official acts.” Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts justified this decision by “constant principles of separation of powers.”
The Court therefore refers the case back to the court of first instance to determine which acts are potentially immune from criminal prosecution. The burden is on the prosecution to demonstrate that they are not when they were carried out in the exercise of its functions.
Donald Trump welcomed the “historic decision,” saying it invalidated most of the charges in the four criminal proceedings against him.
With this jurisprudence, Donald Trump will be “emboldened to do what he wants, when he wants” in the event of victory in the November presidential election, Joe Biden denounced.
Harder to prosecute former presidents?
Beyond the case of the former White House tenant, this decision “redefines the institution of the presidency” by transforming its holder into “a king above the law in every use of his official power”, wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her dissenting opinion joined by her two progressive colleagues.
“When the president does it, it means it’s not illegal,” quips John Dean, White House counsel at the time of the Watergate scandal in 1974, citing then-President Richard Nixon’s line of defense. “Upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States in 2024,” he concludes.
According to Steven Schwinn, a constitutional law professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, “to the extent that Donald Trump was trying to drag this out until after the election, he was completely successful.”
The decision “will seriously hamper the prosecution of a former president since his official and unofficial actions are so often intertwined,” he worries.
In the absence of a real trial before the vote, “there could be detailed hearings on the facts incriminated in the indictment to determine on which ones immunity applies, which will allow to remind the population of all the acts of Trump and the events of January 6” 2021, underlines nevertheless the former federal prosecutor and professor of criminal law Randall Eliason. The entire procedure for this trial, initially scheduled to start on March 4, had already been suspended for four months.
Original article published on BFMTV.com
