No, it was a pretty blatant violation of due process. Trump was denied the right to a trial. It should be overturned by any honest appellate court.
The judge literally already declared what the judgement was going to be, before key witnesses were heard. That's not due process, and undeniable evidence of unacceptable bias. Which means that based on the most fundamental of legal principles, this whole thing should be thrown out on appeal.
Not how stuff works.
Basically, the Jury is the finder of facts. The Judge is the determiner of law. If key facts are not in dispute, then summary judgement happens, and a jury trial is by-passed in civil cases.
Basically, sometimes everyone agrees X happened, they just question whether X broke the law or what the remedy for X is. That's actually for a judge to decide.
A classic example: say a cop arrested someone for flipping him off. The arrested person then sues the cop for violating the first amendment. Everyone agrees that the cop arrested the man for that reason. They just disagree about it violating the first amendment. A jury is not chosen to determine what the first amendment says or is, the Judge does. In fact, most cases that go to the Supreme Court are like this: they never actually go to trial, but are just questions of law.
Now if there are facts in dispute that are germane to the case, then you'd require a jury, but I don't believer there were here. Trump agreed that he set the value at $X M, pointed out that the banks didn't care, but since $X M was way over priced, he admitted to the crime. Now there is the question of if that number was actually over priced, which is basically is one and only shot at this.
As a side note, the right to a jury trial for civil trials is actually not even established, just civil trials.
Furthermore, on that basis, in any half-way decent legal system, Trump should be able to obtain an order to stay the execution of the verdict until his appeal has been handled. (In other words: "going after his assets" should be blocked until the highest qualified court - I assume that would be the Supreme Court -- reaches a final decision.)
He sorta can. The money is put in an escrow account, not forked over. It's just that it's so much money that it causes issues regardless. Note that NY has the idea that you basically have to put the money into the escrow account prior to any appeal.
Also, NY doesn't have the right to go after assets if Trump pays into the Escrow account in full. It basically blocks them from proceeding.
Note that some of the judgement happening immediatly is very normal though, because appeals processes take basically forever in America. So if someone is convicted of murder, say, we don't want to wait until all of their appeals are done before putting them in jail.
HE DIDN'T BREAK THE LAW
I SAID HE DIDN'T BREAK THE LAW
READ MORE
It actually is legally wrong
Oh, please be a lot more clear with your pronouns then. I treated it as if "it" referred to what Trump did (my assumption), not what I said.
