Herson Cabreras said he was surprised when the judge overseeing Donald Trump’s criminal trial in New York dismissed him from jury duty Thursday, after he had already been jailed.
“It surprised me, it really surprised me,” Cabreras, previously known only as Juror Number 4, said in an exclusive interview with USA TODAY. “I said, ‘Wow, there’s something else going on here.’ But they decided not to take me, and that’s it. So what can I say?
Cabreras, a computer scientist and political consultant, felt like he was inserted in the middle of a “competition” between Judge Juan Merchan, the prosecution and the defense.
“Everyone wants to appear beautiful and fair in front of the public, but they don’t act fair,” Cabreras said.
Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels to influence the 2016 election.
Another juror who was selected Tuesday was also dismissed Thursday, in her case, because she said she no longer believed she could be impartial.
A very old arrest
The brouhaha over his jury duty arose after prosecutors raised the issue of a 1991 incident in which Cabreras and an associate were accused of tearing down political campaign signs in Harrison, New York, a suburb of New York. The majority of signs belonged to Republicans.
But Cabreras, who is nearly 70, said he barely remembered the incident that happened 33 years ago when he was first confronted about it by the prosecution on Thursday. He said he had served on civil juries in New York and never had to disclose the poster incident.
“I didn’t expect them to look at my 30-year history and come up with something I didn’t even remember,” he said.
“I just thought it was an excuse” for prosecutors to remove him from the jury, Cabreras said.
During the courtroom confrontation that led to his firing, largely inaudible to the reporters present, Cabreras expected Merchan to intervene. But, according to Cabreras, Merchan let prosecutors get away with the poster incident, using it to push him off the panel.
“I looked at him like, ‘Aren’t you going to say something?'” Cabreras recalled. “I’m sitting there, I’m the target, and he’s supposed to judge. And he just let it happen, he didn’t say anything.”
Although it is unclear what prompted prosecutors to pursue the 1991 incident, the questionnaire provided to jurors required them to disclose prior encounters with law enforcement or the criminal justice system.
During his first voir dire appearance, Cabreras made a now-famous comment that Trump was “fascinating and mysterious.” That phrase has since ricocheted through national media, with analysts trying to guess some sort of political trend from those few words.
At the time of his arrest in 1991, Cabreras had recently worked with aides to then-New York City Mayor David Dinkins, a Democrat.
Cabreras said all he meant was that wherever Trump goes, “he stirs up all kinds of things.”
“The guy comes in and people go crazy,” he said. “That’s what I was trying to say.”
But when Cabreras showed up in court Thursday, he said he “didn’t even notice” Trump.
The entire episode left a bad taste in Cabreras’ mouth, and further left him with concerns about Merchan’s handling of the courtroom, calling him a “cowardly judge”, for allowing the prosecution to brandish these details from decades ago.
“I feel sorry for the other jurors,” he said, expressing concern that other jurors could be drawn into the center of a hard-fought legal battle. “Because if the way they treated me is any indication of how they’re going to treat other potential jurors, then I feel sorry for them.”
But in the end, “they did me a favor,” Cabreras said. Although he thought he could have been impartial, his family “wasn’t happy about the whole thing.”
Asher Stockler is a reporter for The Journal News and USA Today Network New York. You can email him at astockler@lohud.com. Contact him securely: asher.stockler@protonmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Exclusive: Dismissed ‘Juror Number 4’ Calls Judge ‘Coward’
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