President-elect Donald Trump received a historic sentence on Friday, Jan. 10, from New York Judge Juan Merchan, dodging jail time and instead getting “unconditional discharge” for his 34 felony convictions.
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He appeared virtually from Florida for his sentencing on Friday morning at the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse in New York City. The hearing was scheduled at the last minute so that the case could get closure before Inauguration Day, and Trump’s frantic attempts to cancel his sentencing were rejected by the New York State Court of Appeals and U.S. Supreme Court.
Before the sentence was handed down, prosecutor Joshua Steinglass said that — while the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office ultimately recommended unconditional discharge out of respect for the office of the presidency — he did not want to downplay Trump’s “unsubstantiated attacks” on the rule of law and his “coordinated campaign” to undermine the jury’s conclusion.
Trump — who will be sworn in as United States president for a second time on Monday, Jan. 20 — was previously found guilty by 12 jurors of falsifying several business records to conceal a plot to tilt the 2016 presidential election in his favor.
With the unanimous guilty verdict, he became the first sitting or former U.S. president to be convicted of a crime. His charges carried up to four years in prison at the court’s discretion.
What is unconditional discharge?
When Judge Merchan set Trump’s sentencing date, he revealed that he did not intend to put the president-elect behind bars. Instead, the judge suggested, “unconditional discharge appears to be the most viable option to ensure finality and allow Defendant to pursue his appellate options.”
Unconditional discharge is, in effect, a non-punishment — a way that New York courts can acknowledge someone’s conviction as valid while simultaneously releasing them “without imprisonment, fine or probation supervision.”
The sentence is allowed to be handed out in cases where there appears to be “no proper purpose” for imposing restrictions upon someone. Judges are required by New York law to provide reasoning for their decision if they choose to go that route.
Considering Trump’s imminent inauguration — and speculation that a sitting president’s sentence would need to be paused during their time in office anyway — Merchan chose the path of least resistance with his sentence.
Despite declining to give Trump a punishment, Merchan’s final judgment is not exactly how the president-elect wanted things to play out: He remains a convicted felon.
Still, with a sentence now issued and the case closed, Trump can finally pursue a proper appeal of his verdict after seven months. His attorney said on Friday that he plans to.
What did Trump get convicted for?
Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records on May 30, 2024, after spending more than six weeks on trial in Lower Manhattan.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office brought an unprecedented case against Trump that aimed to prove he not only falsified financial records “with intent to defraud” — in this instance, to mask a $130,000 hush money payment made to adult film star Stormy Daniels in the final days of his 2016 presidential election — but that he did so in order to conceal a second crime, which elevates the charges from misdemeanors to felonies.
In falsifying the records, the DA’s office argued, Trump was more broadly attempting to bury evidence of an illegal conspiracy to influence the 2016 election.
Colloquially called Trump’s “hush money” trial, given that Daniels’ hush money payment anchored the narrative, the Manhattan case went far beyond white-collar crime. It was the first of four criminal cases brought against the former president in 2023 — three of which hit on themes of election interference.
Through hard evidence and exhaustive witness testimony, Manhattan prosecutors painted a portrait of a former reality TV star who unlawfully tilted a presidential election in his favor by conspiring with powerful friends to suppress information from voters.
Jurors’ guilty verdict signaled that — beyond a reasonable doubt — the evidence presented to them supported the prosecution’s story.
Trump’s three other criminal cases never went to trial, but in unrelated civil lawsuits since leaving the White House, Trump has been found liable of committing fraud while building his real estate empire as well as sexually abusing and defaming former Elle columnist E. Jean Carroll. Each of those cases carried substantial fines.
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