Ms. Cohen was entitled to a trial on whether she committed the charged offenses, not on whether she was a successful professional. The errors here worked together to deprive her of that right by injecting allegations of numerous ethical breaches, turning...
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Ms. Cohen was entitled to a trial on whether she committed the charged offenses, not on whether she was a successful professional. The errors here worked together to deprive her of that right by injecting allegations of numerous ethical breaches, turning the ethical rules into necessary statements of criminal law, and smearing her professional character while also excluding all evidence of her illness and hospitalization and calling mental illness "shameful." They then prevented her from correcting that shift in focus by denying her and her counsel any ability to help craft answers to jurors’ questions about that same evidence, and by excluding her from jurors’ presence during a critical time. Viewed individually or cumulatively, those errors violated her constitutional right to a fair trial conducted in accordance with the criminal law. That result cannot stand.
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