No. of Recommendations: 0
Sure. But how many times do you have to listen to the same request with different arguments?
Several times. It is routine beyond belief for the defense to argue that they should win the case at each point in the trial at which they are permitted to request such relief. This is Criminal Procedure 101. Every defendant can (if they choose) move to dismiss at the very beginning based on the charging documents, to dismiss at any time during the pre-trial phase based on legal arguments, dismiss after the evidence is set because it is allegedly insufficient, during the trial because of alleged errors, after trial but before jury verdict (motion for directed verdict), after the trial based on arguments the jury was wrong, and probably a dozen more that I've missed because I'm not a criminal lawyer.
This is just basic stuff. None of it is dilatory, or even vexatious. It's just basic professional responsibility. If you don't move to dismiss the charges at the right time, you might end up having waived any argument that the charges should have been dismissed at that time - so competent defense counsel will ask for the charges to be dropped at each stage.
Obviously that means you can cut off arguments. If the argument should have been raised earlier, then you can tell the defense they should have raised it earlier, so they can't raise it now. But that's a big part of the reason, of course, that they raise arguments at every stage in the trial - because they'd much rather be told by the judge that they raised it too early than too late.
Here, a Big Thing has happened that is a novel event - not just in the trial, but in history. Defense could not have raised any arguments predicated on Trump being the President-elect any earlier....because he wasn't President-elect until this past week. So, yeah....they're going to get a week to draft their arguments, so that the appellate court doesn't just punt it back down to trial court on appeal saying that the trial court should have considered their argument first.
Albaby
