A year ago, Donald J. Trump faced 91 felony counts in four criminal cases, enough for a typical defendant to spend years behind bars.
But today, Mr. Trump still walks free — and is running for president. One of his cases was thrown out. The US Supreme Court derailed the second. The third is delayed indefinitely. And on Friday, in his only criminal case that actually made it to trial and scratched his legal Teflon, he pulled off one of his most surprising victories yet.
At Mr. Trump’s request, and without objection from prosecutors, the judge presiding over his criminal trial in Manhattan postponed his sentencing until after the election, in which Mr. Trump will compete for the presidency against Vice President Kamala Harris. Judge, Juan M. Merchan, earlier during the heart of the campaign, planned to impose the sentence on September 18.
The decision by a judge who has so far kept the case moving is a surprising recognition of the former president’s legal strategy of using his wealth and political status – and the help of the Supreme Court – to drag out the case and minimize its impact. his campaign. The delay all but guarantees that, on Election Day, Mr. Trump will be a criminal, but also a free man.
Mr. Trump, who faces up to four years in prison for falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal, sought the delay to buy time to challenge his conviction. The former president, who campaigned on claims that a corrupt court system victimized him, also argued that it was unfair to face punishment so close to election day, even though the timing was the result of his own stalling tactics.
But the delay will fuel competing charges of unfairness, as Mr. Trump’s critics see a justice system that treats ordinary defendants one way, and the singular Mr. Trump another. While sentencing delays are routine, New York law instructs judges to impose sentences “without unreasonable delay,” and they often do so within six weeks of a conviction. Mr. Trump has now bought himself six months.
“While there have been various delays due to judicial sensitivity to the fact that a former president is campaigning for the White House, the courts — including the U.S. Supreme Court — at this point have advanced the perfectly understandable and legitimate impression that the former president is indeed above the law. ,” J. Michael Luttig, a prominent conservative former U.S. Court of Appeals judge who has been a frequent critic of the former president, said Saturday.
In practice, the delay may have little effect. Even if the judge had pushed ahead this month, he or the appeals court would have stayed the sentence at least until after the election. An appeals court could also have intervened to overrule the judge and stay the sentence.
Justice Merchan, a veteran judge who vowed to “apply the rules of law uniformly” before Mr Trump’s trial, faced what legal experts called an “extremely difficult” and “impossible” conundrum. Whatever his decision, the judge was bound to sweep away vast swaths of the country and invite biased second-guessing for years to come.
“On the one hand, everyone is subject to the same rules and no one is above the law, and on the other hand, obviously, you have to consider the individual circumstances of the defendant. You,” said Michael D. Aubus, a retired state Supreme Court justice who served for more than two decades and has known Justice Merchan for years.
“This is almost as unique as it gets,” he said, adding, “I’m sure Judge Murch has never faced a sentencing decision like this.”
In a four-page ruling Friday, Justice Merchan, a moderate Democrat who was once a registered Republican, gave the nod for the election, citing “the unique time frame this case currently finds itself in.”
But he argued that the delay in sentencing was of the least political consequence. Calling the court an “impartial, impartial and apolitical body”, Justice Murchan stressed that the adjournment should “remove any suggestion that the court has issued any decision or imposed any sentence to benefit or disadvantage any political party”. .”
Mr. Trump, he also wrote, “has the right to a sentence that respects and protects his constitutional rights.”
Still, Justice Murchan lamented some of Mr. Trump’s arguments. The judge, whom Mr Trump has repeatedly tried to oust from the case, described them as “alleged and unsubstantiated complaints”.
He also noted that sentencing is routinely postponed — especially when prosecutors don’t oppose the request. However, prosecutors from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office had Judge adjournedJustice Murchan argued that his filing supported Mr Trump’s bid to delay the September sentencing by citing obstacles.
“His ruling was accurate and honest, a wise outcome,” said Mark Zauderer, a New York lawyer who sits on a committee that examines applicants for the court that will hear Mr. Trump’s appeal. “If the prosecuting party does not object to the delay, why should the judge object?” He added that the judge avoided “the appearance of politics dictating the outcome”.
It wasn’t just the political calendar, or Mr. Trump’s status as a former and potential future president, that fueled his bid for a delay. It was also money, a lot of it, that he had to pay lawyers to precipitate a series of interruptions and delays.
And unlike nearly every criminal who cycles through the courthouse in lower Manhattan, Mr. Trump has a giant megaphone — his own social media company — to attack judges and amplify calls for delays.
“To be fair, it’s common practice for defendants to delay their cases, and delays are usually to their advantage,” said Jill Konwieser, another retired judge who is friendly with Judge Merchan. “The stark difference here is that the defendant has the power and money to afford lawyers to extend and force delays.”
At a campaign event in Charlotte on Friday, Mr. Trump said his sentence in Manhattan was postponed “because everybody knows there’s no case because I’ve done nothing wrong.”
District Attorney, Alvin L. A Bragg spokeswoman said: “A jury of 12 New Yorkers quickly and unanimously convicted Donald Trump of 34 felony counts,” adding that the prosecution is “prepared for sentencing at a new date set by the court.”
Mr. Bragg’s case made Mr. Trump the first former president to be convicted and the only one of Mr. Trump’s charges that was poised to reach the finish line before Election Day.
A federal judge in Florida Case dismissed In which Mr. Trump was accused of mishandling classified documents. In Georgia, where he is accused of trying to overturn a 2020 election loss in the state, an effort to disqualify a prosecutor has delayed the case indefinitely. And when Mr. Trump’s election interference case in Washington was scheduled for trial this year, the Supreme Court derailed that plan.
In a landmark decision, the court granted Mr. Trump broad immunity for official acts undertaken as president. That ruling stunned some legal scholars, who lamented it as constitutionally unsound and the latest legal bailout of a man who continues to get lucky breaks.
Although Mr. Trump’s luck ended briefly when he was convicted in May of falsifying records to hide payments to porn star Stormy Daniels, the Supreme Court ruling helped him in that case as well. Mr Trump’s lawyers asked Justice Merchan to postpone the sentencing, originally set for July 11, so he could consider a plea to quash the conviction after the High Court’s decision.
Justice Merchan eventually agreed to rule on his request for September 16 and move the sentencing to September 18, but Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Todd Blanche and Emile Bowe, argued that the new schedule was too narrow, laying the groundwork for that. Judge to push past the election.
It was just their latest attempt to create a delay, a systematic effort that began earlier this year when they sought to halt hearings for 90 days to review new evidence. The judge gave him only three weeks, but any delay, even a day, would bring the case closer to Election Day.
Mr Trump himself regularly held that the judge was “rushing this trial” and “moving too quickly” to do “everything he can do for the Democrats”.
On Saturday, at a Wisconsin rally, he said “the big news this week is that the Manhattan DA witch hunt against me has been postponed, because everyone knows there’s no case because I’ve done nothing wrong.”
His protests about the justice system contrast with his stance as a conservative on crime.
After the 1989 rape and beating of a white female jogger in Central Park in which five black and Latino teenagers were wrongfully convicted, Mr. Trump ran newspaper ads calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty. He regularly calls for the jailing of his political enemies, including what he calls members of the “Biden crime family”.
And, when asked to comment on the recent pardon of a man convicted of domestic violence, Mr. Trump’s spokeswoman, Carolyn Levitt, said only, “President Trump believes that a person convicted of a crime should spend time behind bars. “
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