A note before you read: this was written while the New York trial was still underway. The jury did return a conviction, and the appeals have been working through the courts since. Treat this as dated commentary on the jury instruction question, and check current news for where the case stands now.
I’m Lance Rankin, and I run Western Sport, a gun shop north of Fort Worth. I’m not a lawyer and this isn’t a politics blog, but I follow courtroom procedure closely because Second Amendment cases live and die on it. The video above raises a procedural question about the Trump trial in New York that’s worth understanding whatever you think of the defendant, because the same mechanics show up in gun cases all the time.
What jury instructions actually do
The jury decides the facts. The judge tells the jury what law to apply to those facts. That’s the whole arrangement, and it means the instructions are where a case can quietly be won or lost. Jurors trust the judge; he’s the neutral authority in the room. If the instructions tilt, the verdict tends to tilt with them.
The predicate crime problem
The New York charge is falsifying business records: payments allegedly logged as legal expenses to conceal another crime. Note the structure. The felony version of the charge requires an underlying crime, a predicate, that the records were falsified to cover up. Normally, if you’re accused of covering up a crime, the state proves the original crime beyond a reasonable doubt, element by element, and then proves the cover-up the same way. Cover up a murder? First prove the murder.
The concern raised in the video is that Judge Merchan’s instructions might not require the jury to agree unanimously on which predicate crime was committed. Give the jury a menu of possible underlying violations and let them convict so long as each juror believes some crime is in there somewhere. Four jurors pick door one, four pick door two, four pick door three: no unanimous agreement on any single predicate, yet the conviction proceeds anyway. If the standard of proof on the predicate slips below reasonable doubt at the same time, the problem compounds.
Maybe an appeals court eventually says that’s improper. But appeals take years, and the immediate effect, a conviction on the books at a politically useful moment, is already achieved. The remedy arriving late is part of the strategy.
Why a gun shop owner cares
Because this is exactly how Second Amendment litigation gets played, and I’ve watched it for years. A state passes a restrictive gun law. A district judge upholds it, or a circuit slow-walks the case, and everyone involved knows the appeal will take three, five, seven years. The law may ultimately fall as unconstitutional, but it governed for the better part of a decade, which was the point. Magazine bans, carry restrictions, the brace rule: pick your example. Winning eventually is not the same as winning, and the people who write these strategies understand that better than anyone.
The lesson I’d offer my customers isn’t about this trial or that defendant. It’s that process is where rights are actually protected or lost. Knowing the law isn’t enough; you have to watch how it’s applied, who’s applying it, and what the clock is doing while the appeals grind. That’s as true for a records case in Manhattan as it is for the next carry case out of the Fifth Circuit.
As of this writing the appeals are still moving, so don’t take this post as the last word on the case. Take it as a reason to read jury instructions, in any case you care about, as closely as you’d read a contract.
Lance Rankin is the owner and Chief Gunsmith of Western Sport, a family-run Type 07 FFL and Class 3/SOT dealer in Roanoke, Texas, serving shooters since 2007. Born and raised in Texas with over 50 years of experience handling firearms, Lance purchased Western Sport in 2017 and turned his lifelong passion into his profession. He specializes in AR-15 and AR-10 platform rifles, manufactures Western Sport’s own AR-15 line under the Rankin Industries brand, and runs the shop’s in-house Cerakote coating operation. When he’s not behind the counter or the workbench, you’ll find him on his ranch deep into the night, hunting coyotes with an AR-15 and thermal optics. Lance holds an MBA and personally shoots and tests the products Western Sport sells.
