The Minnesota appellate courts might not reverse the conviction but the United States Supreme Court well might, as they have done in other cases involving jury intimidation.

In seeking to put her thumb on the scales of justice, Rep. Maxine Waters perhaps unwittingly borrowed a tactic right out of the Deep South of the early 20^th century.

In the Deep South during the 1920s and '30s, elected politicians would organize demonstrations by white voters in front of courthouses in which racially charged trials were being conducted. The politicians then threatened, explicitly or implicitly, that violence would follow the acquittal of a black defendant or the conviction of a white defendant. The U.S. Supreme Court and other federal courts reversed several convictions based on these tactics of intimidation.

The judge in the Chauvin trial made a serious error in not sequestering the jury during the entire trial.

Already, we have seen blood sprayed over the former home of a witness who testified for Chauvin; the defendant's lawyers have received threats. An aura of violence is in the air. Jurors breathe that same air....

This is not the Deep South in the 1920s. It is the "Identity Politics" of the 21st century. But the motives of the protesters are not relevant to whether jurors in the Chauvin case could be expected to consider the evidence objectively without fear of the kind of intimidation threatened by Waters.

The evidence, in my view, supports a verdict of manslaughter, but not of murder. Any verdict that did not include a conviction for murder was likely to be unacceptable to Waters and her followers, however, even if the facts and the law mandate that result. Waters is not interested in neutral justice. She wants vengeance for what she and her followers justifiably see as the unjustified killing of George Floyd.... That is not the rule of law. That is the passion of the crowd.

We must be certain that threats of intimidation do not influence jury verdicts. That certainty does not exist now in the Chauvin case, thanks largely to the ill-advised threats and demands of Maxine Waters and others.

The lockdown has already put too much economic pressure on small businesses. A total of 125,000 small businesses and shop owners have gone bankrupt during the pandemic. That makes an estimated 500,000 people in Turkey badly affected by the unfortunate blend of economic and pandemic mismanagement...

Growing poverty is seen in other official numbers too. Energy Minister Fatih Dönmez said that power distribution companies cut electricity supplies to 3.7 million households last year due to unpaid debts. That makes more than 10 million Turks having to live without power due to inability to pay bills.

As of December 11, there were 22,759,000 cases of legal proceedings for unpaid debts, corporate and individual. Unemployment is another pressing problem.

This means that means Turkey must maintain its lockdown rules. Further lockdown, however, will mean further economic contraction especially in a country that depends on tourist industry revenues.

The pandemic has further impoverished Turkey's fragile economy. It threatens to do worse damage to the budgets of poorer families, who are the core of the voting public. One recent study says that Erdoğan loyalists are the biggest number of voters who will vote differently or abstain from voting in the next elections.

Erdoğan's biggest political rival appears to be poverty.