A question for our legal experts: I’ve heard conflicting opinions from TV pundits on the likelihood of a prison sentence. Many said that a majority of defendants guilty of these types of crimes see no prison time. No, no, no, countered at least one. At best that’s misleading.
His point being that a majority of defendants who pleaded guilty avoided incarceration. IOW, most people cop a plea with the specific objective of avoiding prison time (and most people do cop a plea for these charges). A large percentage (I can’t remember if it was a majority) of those found guilty after a jury trial do go to prison.
Very tough to get to the bottom of what ought to be a straightforward statistic. Any thoughts?
I didn’t say it was smart. I said it was unlikely to make things worse for him.
Now, all the other things he has said and continues to say, sure, those demonstrate a pattern of behavior that should be taken into account. But a single immediate reaction? Not smart but not much on its own.
Michael Cohen, speaking after Donald Trump’s guilty verdict Thursday, said he was “relieved” and wasn’t surprised by the verdict.
“This has been six years in the making,” he told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.
When Maddow asked if he was surprised by the verdict, Cohen said: “No. I was not.”
“At the end of the day, the facts are what prevailed here,” Cohen said. “It’s accountability, it’s exactly what America needs right now.”
Cohen praised the judge and prosecutors for their work and said he stayed off social media in respect for the judge and the process.
He said he faced difficulty dealing with the anxiety of the trial.
“I was nervous because so much was riding on the result of this, and I wanted to ensure that my testimony was perfect. I knew that there could be no deviation from perfection,” he said.
Cohen called Todd Blanche, Trump’s attorney, a “SLOAT” – stupidest lawyer of all time. During his closing arguments, Blanche had called Cohen a “GLOAT” – the greatest liar of all time.
I earlier quoted from a Reuters story where they only found one instance of a felony business records conviction, with no other crimes, where the defendant was incarcerated (36 hours a week for one year).
But compared to other white collar crime convicts, Trump is at unusually high risk of reoffending.
If I was researching his presentencing report, I would ask him what he was doing to make sure he cannot, intentionally or accidentally, violate campaign laws in his current campaign. If he doesn’t have a good answer, I do not see how you can recommend probation.
This should not be because of wanting Trump to be punished. It is because of wanting to prevent crime. If Trump actually, and quickly, puts up a wall between his campaign, himself, and his cronies, probation may make sense. But by all indications he feels no remorse, and thus no need to do such.
The problem there, of course, is that that is a question Trump won’t answer. Not just that question, though, I can see him answering every question with, “Rigged trial, corrupt and conflicted judge, Biden’s fault, legal scholars said this trial never should have been brought, nobody’s ever seen anything like it,” and similar. Not a good idea, in my view. Better to try to work with the probation officer by answering their questions honestly and candidly. After all, their pre-sentencing report might make things easier on Trump.
I’m no expert, but I sat through a lot of sentencings. Here’s some information I gleaned over many years:
People who enter pleas will receive far more favorable treatment than people who force the courts to try them to a verdict of guilty. The whole reason the plea agreement system works is because there is an advantage to be gained for the defendant if they enter a plea and don’t waste judicial time.
It would be very unusual – and I can’t emphasize this enough – for a judge to impose a lesser sentence for a defendant who is more culpable for the crime than a co-defendant.
Michael Cohen was a co-defendant under this identical set of facts in a federal case. Cohen had a sentence of 3 years in federal prison imposed for the same criminal behavior as Trump. And he entered a plea and agreed to cooperate with officials by testifying in other cases.
He also wasn’t the prime beneficiary of the criminal enterprise. Trump was.
Cohen was a first-time offender. He also expressed remorse and regret for his behavior and took responsibility for it. It didn’t help him.
I think Judge Merchan will be thinking about all this a great deal in deciding what sentence to impose on Trump. And I think the pundits who are saying there is “no way” Trump will have prison time considered and in some way imposed are likely full of shit.
Judge Merchan may stay imposition of the prison sentence contingent on a very strict set of rules for a probationary term, but we all know how that will go for Trump. He’ll end up in the slammer.
I think that this defense team was suitably competent, but the problem was that Trump couldn’t keep from interfering with what they thought was best. I’m sure that there were many times when Blanche et al. thought to themselves, “And just what law school did you go to, Donnie?”
In his CNN interview with Kaitlin Collins, Blanche alluded to how the legal team worked with Trump. He didn’t say whether that was good or bad, but it is a logical conclusion that if they recommended something as the best approach, Trump would argue in favour of something else that he liked better.
