After months of delay, the criminal case against elected president Donald J. Trump in New York culminated on Friday (10) with the future president of the country avoiding prison, but effectively becoming a criminal.
“Never before has this court been presented with such a unique and remarkable set of circumstances,” said the trial judge, Juan M. Merchan, during Trump’s sentencing ceremony. “This was truly an extraordinary case.”
He then imposed a so-called unconditional discharge of Trump’s sentence, a rare and lenient alternative to prison or probation. Explaining his leniency, Judge Merchan acknowledged that Trump would assume the presidency of the country in 10 days.
“Donald Trump, the ordinary citizen, Donald Trump, the criminal defendant” would not have the protections of the presidency, Judge Merchan said, explaining that only the office protected the defendant from the severity of the verdict.
“This court has determined that the only legal sentence that allows for a conviction judgment without infringing upon the highest office in the land is an unconditional discharge,” Judge Merchan said.
He then wished Trump “good luck” and left the courtroom.
Despite the leniency, the ceremony held symbolic importance: it formalized Trump’s status as a criminal, making him the first to carry this designation into the presidency of the world’s largest economic power.
Although he already knew he would not face any penalty, Trump tried to avoid carrying this mark of being the only convicted president by appealing to the Supreme Court, which, by a 5 to 4 majority, did not prevent the New York state court’s sentence from being issued. A surprising demonstration of independence from a court that has seemed sympathetic to Trump in several other cases.
Trump appeared virtually at the ceremony, with his image projected on a screen in a Lower Manhattan courtroom filled with reporters. The elected president was at his property in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, sitting next to one of his lawyers in front of a pair of large American flags.
“This was a very terrible experience,” Trump said during the hearing, adding: “The fact is that I am totally innocent.”
Claiming the primacy of the election over the verdict, he said that voters “were able to see this firsthand.”
The case
After a seven-week trial last spring, a jury of 12 New Yorkers convicted Trump on 34 counts of felony falsification of business records. The case arose from a cash payment to silence porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016, who was about to sell her story of a sexual encounter with Trump. Had the matter become public, Daniels could have triggered a scandal in the final days of Trump’s 2016 campaign. The jury concluded that Trump reimbursed his intermediary, Michael D. Cohen, for the money to silence her and then ordered the records to be falsified to keep the payment secret.
The punishment
Trump could have been sentenced to four years in prison, but his electoral victory made incarceration a practical and unconstitutional impossibility. Hence the sentence of “unconditional discharge.” That is, there will be no fines, community service, or punishment. Despite being convicted, thanks to the voters who put him back in the White House, Trump was “discharged” from punishment.
Source: The New York Times