One year ago, Donald J. Trump faced 91 felony counts across four criminal cases, enough for an ordinary defendant to brace for years behind bars.
But today, Mr. Trump still walks free — and is running for president. One of his cases was thrown out. The U.S. Supreme Court derailed another. A 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 wins yet.
At Mr. Trump’s request, and without objection from prosecutors, the judge who presided over his criminal trial in Manhattan postponed his sentencing until after the election, in which Mr. Trump will square off against Vice President Kamala Harris for the presidency. The judge, Juan M. Merchan, had previously planned to impose the punishment on Sept. 18, during the heart of the campaign.
The decision from a judge who until now had propelled the case relentlessly forward is a surprising validation of the former president’s legal strategy to use his wealth and political status — and an assist from the Supreme Court — to drag out the case and diminish its impact on his campaign. The delay all but guarantees that, on Election Day, Mr. Trump will remain a felon, but also a free man.
Mr. Trump, who faces up to four years in prison for falsifying records to conceal a sex scandal, had sought the delay to buy time to challenge his conviction. The former president, who campaigns on claims that a corrupt court system has victimized him, also argued it would be unfair to face sentencing so close to Election Day, even though that timing was the result of his own stalling tactics.
But the delay will fuel a competing accusation of unfairness, as Mr. Trump’s critics perceive a justice system that treats normal defendants one way, and the singular Mr. Trump another. While sentencing delays are routine, New York law instructs judges to impose a punishment “without unreasonable delay,” and they often do so within six weeks of conviction. Mr. Trump has now bought himself six months.
“To the extent the various delays have been caused by judicial sensitivity to the fact that the former president is campaigning for the White House, those courts — including the U.S. Supreme Court — have furthered the entirely understandable and legitimate impression at this point 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 on Saturday.
Practically, the delay might have little impact. Even if the judge had pushed ahead this month, he or an appeals court almost certainly would have postponed the punishment until after the election, at least. An appeals court also could have intervened to overrule the judge and postpone the sentencing.
Justice Merchan, a veteran judge who vowed before Mr. Trump’s trial to apply “the rules of law evenhandedly,” faced what legal experts called an “extremely difficult” and even “impossible” conundrum. Whatever his decision, the judge was bound to alienate wide swaths of the country and invite partisan second-guessing for years to come.
“There is the tension, on the one side, between everybody being subject to the same set of rules, and nobody being above the law, and, on the other hand, obviously, you must take into account the individual circumstances of the defendant before you,” said Michael D. Obus, a retired State Supreme Court judge who served for more than two decades and has known Justice Merchan for years.
“This one is about as unique as it can be,” he said, adding, “I’m certain that Judge Merchan has never faced a sentencing decision like this one.”
In a four-page ruling on Friday, Justice Merchan, a moderate Democrat who was once a registered Republican, nodded to the election, citing the “unique time frame this matter currently finds itself in.”
But he contended that delaying the sentencing was the least politicized outcome. Calling the court a “fair, impartial and apolitical institution,” Justice Merchan asserted that the postponement should “dispel any suggestion that the court will have issued any decision or imposed any sentence either to give an advantage to, or create a disadvantage for, any political party.”
Mr. Trump, he also wrote, “has the right to a sentencing hearing that respects and protects his constitutional rights.”
Still, Justice Merchan bemoaned some of Mr. Trump’s arguments. The judge, whom Mr. Trump repeatedly tried to oust from the case, described them as a “litany of perceived and unsubstantiated grievances.”
He also noted that sentencings are routinely postponed — particularly when prosecutors do not oppose the request. Although prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney’s office had deferred to the judge, Justice Merchan argued that their filing seemingly supported Mr. Trump’s bid to delay by pointing out obstacles to a September sentencing.
“His ruling was accurate and honest, a wise result,” said Mark Zauderer, a New York litigator who sits on a committee that screens applicants for the court that will hear Mr. Trump’s appeal. “If the party prosecuting doesn’t oppose a delay, why should the judge hold to the contrary?” He added that the judge avoided “the appearance of politics dictating the result.”
It was not just the political calendar, or Mr. Trump’s status as a former and possibly future president, that bolstered his bid for a delay. It was also the money, a lot of it, that he has at his disposal to pay lawyers to concoct a series of distractions 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 the judge and amplify calls for a delay.
“To be fair, it’s common practice for defendants to delay their cases, and delay generally inures to their benefit,” said Jill Konviser, another retired judge who is friendly with Justice Merchan. “The stark difference here is that the defendant has the power and the money to afford lawyers to enhance and buttress the delay.”
At a campaign event in Charlotte on Friday, Mr. Trump said that his sentencing in Manhattan was postponed “because everyone realizes that there was no case because I did nothing wrong.”
A spokeswoman for the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, said: “A jury of 12 New Yorkers swiftly and unanimously convicted Donald Trump of 34 felony counts,” adding that the prosecution “stands ready for sentencing on the new date set by the court.”
Mr. Bragg’s case made Mr. Trump the first former president to become a felon and was the only one of Mr. Trump’s indictments that had been poised to reach the finish line before Election Day.
A federal judge in Florida dismissed a case in which Mr. Trump was charged with mishandling classified documents. In Georgia, where he is accused of trying to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state, an effort to disqualify the prosecutor has indefinitely delayed the case. And while Mr. Trump’s election interference case in Washington was once 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 he took 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 catch lucky breaks.
Though Mr. Trump’s luck briefly appeared to run out when he was convicted in May of falsifying the records to hide a payoff to the 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, which had originally been set for July 11, so that he could consider a request to overturn the conviction after the high court’s decision.
Justice Merchan eventually agreed to rule on their request Sept. 16, and to move the sentencing to Sept. 18., but Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, argued that the new timetable was too compressed, laying the groundwork for the judge to push past the election.
It was just their latest attempt to create a delay, an orchestrated effort that began in earnest early this year when they sought to stall the trial 90 days to review new evidence. The judge allowed them only three weeks, but any delay, even a single day, brought the case closer to Election Day.
Mr. Trump himself routinely griped that the judge was “rushing this trial” and “moving too fast” to do “everything he can for the Democrats.”
On Saturday, at a Wisconsin rally, he said that “the big news this week was that the Manhattan D.A. witch hunt against me has been postponed, because everyone realizes that there’s no case because I did nothing wrong.”
His protestations about the justice system have contrasted with his posture as a tough-on-crime conservative.
After the rape and beating of a white female jogger in Central Park in 1989, a case that led to the wrongful conviction of five Black and Latino teenagers, Mr. Trump took out newspaper ads calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty. He routinely calls for the incarceration of his political enemies, including what he calls members of the “Biden Crime Family.”
And, when recently asked to comment about his pardon of a man who went on to be convicted of domestic violence, Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, said only, “President Trump believes anyone convicted of a crime should spend time behind bars.”
The post After a Year of Legal Peril, Trump Seeks Election as a Felon, but Free appeared first on New York Times.
