First time offense, or rather first criminal conviction. The defendant is elderly: 77. The defendant could express public remorse moving forward (included for completeness, yeah I doubt it); as noted by PhillyGuy Trump could express remorse privately to his probation officer (worth nothing to me, worth little to some judges according to my cited study). Offender is running for President, Republicans are less fair minded then Democrats, so judge will consider putting his thumb on the scale for Republicans, just as Comey did.
Any thing else on the list of explicit and implicit mitigating and aggravating factors? We have to include both in our judgment.
My take is that you can gaslight your friends, you can gaslight your family, you can gaslight your employees, you can gaslight the voting public. But in the interest of general deterrence, you should be punished for gaslighting the law, especially when given the option of a public offering of remorse. I don’t care about the defendant’s sincerity; I care about upholding and reinforcing the standard of obedience to the law.
Solomonic ruling? Probation with restrictions, with possible jail time when they are broken. Predictable outcome? More testing of lines, breaking the letter of the law once, spirit of the law afterwards.
Trump doesn’t have to go to jail. The law doesn’t have to be upheld. Most of the world lives in lower or middle income countries where the powerful flout the law and resource allocation is driven by connections rather than productivity. It’s not first world, but it’s not the end of the world either. It can happen here. Over time. But not without a fight.
It is in no way Merchan’s fault that the Republicans want this guy to be in charge. Make better choices, Republicans. Don’t nominate a criminal and then say it’s political interference when he gets sentenced. You have other candidates you can pick who are not criminals and you’ve had plenty of time to prepare.
I still think he will not a jail sentence. He has a month to file a notice of appeal, then six months to actually appeal. That takes us till the end of the year, by which time he is president-elect. Then the appeals court has to consider the case. More delay. Then his lawyers will find some bullshit reason to appeal to SCOTUS. And six justices will find (or invent) reasons to hear the appeal. And then find (or invent) reasons to overturn the conviction.
It will take a long time for state appeals to be exhausted. By then he’ll probably have been convicted of something else. Such a decision would just apply to the facts of that one case. Even assuming such a Supreme Court decision would be unjustified, or poorly justified, compared to the Dred Scott decision it would be relatively minor. Even compared to some of the conservative decisions of recent decades it would be minor.
If I were the judge I’d send him to jail. Not being used to sentencing people I’m not sure how long I would sentence him for, but unlike most cases of house arrest, it would cost the taxpayers less money to put him in jail than to deal with his inevitable violations of the terms of his self-incarceration.
I agree. And the difference with horrible decisions like Dred Scott: this would be an absolute nullification of bedrock constitutional law that has stood for 250 years. Dred Scott was a hamfisted, hateful resolution of an unresolved matter of law.
The order to report to prison can be stayed during appeal. That may happen or it may not. It’s not guaranteed, it’s up the appeal judge.
So I suspect Trump’s team are in a bit of a quandary about this. Based on their response to be immunity case I can totally see them taking the case, and staying the sentence while they do (probably more so than the NY appeals judges), but "probably* won’t ultimately uphold his appeal. So do they try and fast track to the SCOTUS or not? Ultimately fast tracking is the last thing they want to do.
One possibility is violation of something guaranteed by the bill of rights.
If Trump doesn’t run out of money to pay his lawyers, and Trump exhausts state-level appears, they will think of something. That does not mean the Supreme Court would agree to hear the case.
