For anyone who values the Sixth Amendment, or cares about due process in criminal trials, the case of NY v. Trump is astonishing. Because of Trump’s status, and the ambiguity surrounding the underlying crime, NY v. Trump recalls the worst excesses of Seventeenth Century England when the Star Chamber terrorized opponents of King Charles I. The case has no American precedent, and no English precedent the past 350 years.

Trump is charged with falsifying business records to conceal some underlying crime. Typically, such trials require prosecutors to prove a specific initial crime, then prove a second crime of falsifying records to conceal the initial crime. It is a difficult burden.

Here, prosecutors sensed the burden was too high. From the start, through the close of evidence, the prosecution refused to identify the specific crime that Trump allegedly concealed. This is odd. If prosecutors thought they had a lock on proving some initial crime — the best tactic would be to identify the crime, then hammer home its factual elements to the jury. Instead, the evidentiary phase of trial closed, and the initial crime remains anyone’s guess.

With no underlying crime, the Court should discharge the jury and dismiss the case per NY Criminal Procedure Law §300.40. Instead, Judge Merchan held that, although the central allegation is the concealment of a crime, the prosecution need not identify the underlying crime or prove its factual elements. He then tasked the 12-person jury with reaching a legal conclusion about whether “another crime” occurred, but without telling the jury which crime, and without listing the factual elements of possible crimes.

NY Criminal Jury Instructions, 2nd edition, do not authorize juries to reach legal conclusions. The Burden of Proof instruction says the State of New York “must prove beyond a reasonable doubt every element of the crime.” That is, the instructions set out the factual elements of alleged crime(s); and jurors decide whether these elements have been proven.

Requiring criminal indictments to be specific protects a free society: 1) it enables the accused to prepare a defense, and 2) it informs the court whether there is sufficient evidence to convict. Detailed allegations are “one of the great safeguards of the citizen against oppressive and groundless prosecutions …”; US v. Cruikshank.

The Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments embody a tradition dating to the Habeas Corpus Act of 1640, when Parliament codified criminal procedures that stopped abuses of the Star Chamber and similar courts that tried and punished defendants without specific crimes being alleged or proven. Among these criminal procedures was a defendant’s right to be told “the true cause of his detention.”

Donald Trump has been deprived of his constitutional right “to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation”; see Cole v. Arkansas and In Re Oliver. Because he is a former, and possibly the next, American president, and because of the intentionality of the prosecution’s concealment, the trial of NY v. Trump weakens the United States as a free society. This is significant.

Tim Davis has a Ph.D. in economics and a law degree from Oxford University; he practices law in Branson.

This article originally appeared on Springfield News-Leader: New York case against Donald Trump recalls England’s Star Chamber