The Trump Defense: Convict Asks For Leniency Because He Listened To The President

Now this is what I call Trump Derangement Syndrome.

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(photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Every novel criminal defense sounds crazy at first. It sounds like a thing that should not be a defense, until a jury buys it. Think about “temporary insanity.” The first guy to successfully use it was a Civil War general who shot Francis Scott Key’s son because he suspected Key of sleeping with his wife. Nobody thought it would work. Then it worked. Now “crimes of passion” are a thing. And if it happened today, we’d probably reduce the guy’s culpability because of PTSD, a thing people didn’t even know or acknowledge existed in the post-Civil War era.

In Kansas, Patrick Eugene Stein is facing life in prison for his part in a plot to slaughter Muslim refugees. Thank God they caught him!

His lawyers are going to do what they can for him, as they well and nobly should. In their sentencing plea for leniency, Stein’s lawyers cited Donald Trump and the 2016 election as reasons for their client’s damning statements. From the Washington Post:

They note that Stein was an “early and avid supporter” of Trump and argue that the climate in the months leading up to the 2016 election should be taken in account when evaluating the comments prosecutors used to build their case.

During the trial in the spring, prosecutors played back recordings in which Stein described Muslim immigrants as “cockroaches” that needed to be exterminated, and talked about killing Muslims with weapons dipped in pigs’ blood. Two months before the conversation took place, The Washington Post’s Abigail Hauslohner noted, Trump had referenced a questionable tale about Gen. John J. Pershing killing Muslims with bullets dipped in pigs’ blood.

“The court cannot ignore the circumstances of one of the most rhetorically mold-breaking, violent, awful, hateful and contentious presidential elections in modern history, driven in large measure by the rhetorical China shop bull who is now our president,” James Pratt and Michael Shultz, Stein’s defense attorneys, wrote in their sentencing memo, as HuffPost first reported.

Someone “normally at a 3 on a scale of political talk might have found themselves at a 7 during the election,” they argue. “A person, like Patrick, who would often be at a 7 during a normal day, might ‘go to 11.’”

I can only imagine how conservatives would react, what with their alleged focused on “law and order” (unless you are a white man accused of sexual assault or a cop accused of police brutality). But as a criminal-justice-reform-minded “lib,” I’m open to the idea of looking at Trump as a mitigating factor. The argument — Trump is a deranged jerk and he inspires other deranged jerks to act out — seems plausible to me.

There is a “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” but it’s not on the left. We’re seeing multiple, violent examples of white domestic terrorists who feel emboldened by Donald Trump and his white supremacist rhetoric and policies.

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However, if I were the judge (and I’ll note that I’m available), I would ultimately reject Stein’s argument. Feeling emboldened to commit a crime is not a mitigating factor in the commission of that crime. There are many scenarios and hypotheticals where a person gains confidence that their criminal actions are justified, but the fact that the criminal believed he was justified is not a mitigating factor, so long as he knew his wrong.

I mean, Trump tells you that you can grab women by the p***y. But nobody is going to go out there and do it and say, “The president says it’s okay.”

Last week, a man accused of groping another passenger on a Southwest Airlines flight reportedly told authorities that “the President of the United States says it’s okay to grab women by their private parts.”

Goddamn it.

Really, it’s an existential debate. Is Trump the cause of the increased level of hate crimes and violence we’ve seen since his election? Or his he merely the chief symptom of the rise of white supremacy and violence against women?

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I tend towards the latter. The Patrick Steins and the Robert Bowerses and the Cesar Sayocs are emboldened not by what Donald Trump says, but that Donald Trump exists. Trump (and the Republican party) are not the cause of the hatred and racism of these violent men, Trump and the GOP are the primary beneficiaries of this kind of racial hate.

Pointing to Trump’s rhetoric, attorneys for Kansas militiaman convicted of mosque bomb plot ask for a more lenient sentence [Washington Post]

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

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