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Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan may soon be tasked with making the unenviable decision of whether to punish incoming President Donald Trump for crimes 12 New Yorkers determined he committed in a scheme to hide hush money payments to Stormy Daniels and others from voters.
Following Trump’s stunning election victory, it’s unclear what, if any, consequences he will face or if his sentencing will even happen on Nov. 26.
Merchan hasn’t yet ruled on Trump’s request to reject the jury’s findings and throw out the case.
Trump has argued that the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling granting the president sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution barred the Manhattan district attorney’s office from presenting evidence relating to his time in office at his spring trial and should nullify the verdict.
Should Merchan reject the argument in his decision expected by Nov. 12, Trump’s lawyers, who have already succeeded at getting the sentencing pushed back twice, will almost certainly challenge it from going forward.
Retired New York Supreme Court Justice Alan Marrus said Merchan might go ahead with it but that any term imposed would likely be “stayed” — meaning paused — until Trump is out of office unless he gets the verdicts overturned on appeal.
“This is such an unprecedented situation, I obviously have had no experience with anything like this before,” Marrus said.
Barring defendants who fled or died, Marrus struggled to think of a case where someone who was found guilty didn’t face sentencing.
“There has to be something that finalizes the whole process,” he said. “Technically, [Merchan] has no power to just come into court and say, ‘I’m not going to sentence the man because he won an election.’ There’s nothing that authorizes a judge from just doing that.”
If prosecutors have a suggestion for what punishment they think Trump should face, they must tell the judge within 10 days before sentencing. The Manhattan DA’s office declined to shed light on what they plan to communicate to Merchan or comment for this story.
“I don’t see why Bragg’s office would want to not go forward with sentencing. What the sentencing would be now faces practical hurdles because you don’t really want to interfere with the transition into a new government,” said a former Manhattan prosecutor who asked not to be named.
“Do you really have him clean the highways while he’s the president-elect and probably has better things to do? I think probably not,” he said, adding that they could not imagine Trump facing jail time.
“It’s a mitigating circumstance — the fact that he was elected with the public knowing that he was convicted of these crimes. I think that’s that.”
Duncan Levin, a defense attorney and former federal prosecutor, questioned whether the matter may end up before the nation’s highest court.
“I don’t know that the Supreme Court would allow a local court to restrain the liberty of even the president-elect,” Levin said.
Trump has also been charged in three other cases. The Associated Press on Wednesday reported that special counsel Jack Smith is searching for avenues to wind down the two federal ones, in which Trump is accused of trying to overturn the results of the last election and hoarding classified documents after leaving office. The latter was thrown out by Trump-appointed federal Judge Aileen Cannon this summer, which Justice Department prosecutors appealed.
Regardless of what Smith does, Trump has vowed to fire him, and his pick for attorney general would have the power to drop both cases.
Unclear also is the fate of Trump’s Georgia state case, in which he’s charged alongside more than a dozen others with RICO offenses stemming from alleged election subversion efforts. Legal onlookers have said that prosecution, which has stalled for months for various reasons, is unlikely to see a resurrection with Trump in the White House.
Outside of his criminal matters, Trump, in the last 18 months, was found civilly liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll in a Midtown department store changing room in the 1990s and defaming her decades later.
His victory “does nothing to change either the fact, as determined by two separate juries, that he sexually assaulted and defamed Ms. Carroll, or the applicable legal principles under which he was held liable for that conduct,” Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, told The News.
The $5 million Trump was ordered to pay Carroll in May 2023 is secured in a court-controlled account. Kaplan said the $83.3 million a second jury awarded her this year for defamatory comments he made as president is fully bonded. Trump is appealing the outcomes of both lawsuits.
Trump and his crew are also appealing the almost half a billion dollars he and his business associates were ordered to pay this year after being found liable for large-scale business fraud. State Attorney General Letitia James said she doesn’t expect the process to wrap up anytime soon.
“We anticipate a decision from the Appellate Division, but as you know, at that point, there will be an appeal to the New York State Court of Appeals,” James said.
The News reached out to Trump’s attorneys for comment.
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(Daily News staff writer Josephine Stratman contributed to this story.)
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©2024 New York Daily News. Visit at nydailynews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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