From Yahoo/People:
“Donald Trump Sentenced to
'Unconditional Discharge' for His Felonies. Here's What That Means”
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. 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.
^ Trump always wanted to be remembered
for something and now he is: the first Convicted Felon President of the United
States.
Anything he does from now on (good
or bad) will have an Asterisk besides it meaning it was done by a Convicted Felon
and not a Law-Abiding Citizen. ^
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