After being sentenced to four years and two months in prison in October, Sean “Diddy” Combs is seeking an immediate release from prison in his latest argument for appeal.
Combs’ lawyers urged a New York federal appeals court on Tuesday to either shorten or lighten the rapper’s more than four-year sentence following his conviction on prostitution-related charges.
“Sean Combs is an extraordinarily successful self-made businessman, artist and a philanthropist, and one of the most accomplished Black men in this country. In September 2024, the government accused him of heinous crimes and arrested and detained him,” the filing obtained by TheWrap and submitted to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan reads. “It said he was a trafficker who coerced and defrauded two long-term girlfriends into having sex against their will and ran a vast criminal organization. None of that was true.”
The lawyers went on to argue that, because a New York jury found Combs not guilty of racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking, the punishment that he received was unusually harsh compared to typical sentencing for prostitution-related charges that didn’t involve force or coercion.
“The jury did find Combs guilty of two lesser counts—prostitution offenses that didn’t require force, fraud, or coercion. Defendants typically get sentenced to less than 15 months for these offenses—even when coercion, which the jury didn’t find here, is involved,” the lawyers argued. “But Combs got a sentence more than three times as long, despite the acquittals.”
“He sits in prison today, serving a 50-month sentence, because the district judge acted as a thirteenth juror,” Combs’ defense went on. “The judge defied the jury’s verdict and found Combs ‘coerced,’ ‘exploited,’ and ‘forced’ his girlfriends to have sex and led a criminal conspiracy. These judicial findings trumped the verdict and led to the highest sentence ever imposed for any remotely similar defendant—even though most others, unlike Combs, ran prostitution businesses that exploited poor or undocumented women or minors.”
Judge Arun Subramanian handed down the sentence in early October after the disgraced music mogul was convicted back in July. At the time, Judge Subramanian said that he wasn’t entirely convinced that Combs would not repeat the crimes, but that he hoped the rapper would “make the most of (his) second chance.”
“You had the power and the resources to keep it going, and because you weren’t caught,” Judge Subramanian told the rapper. “You paid for and organized these acts. You were no John. You were responsible for that, even if your currency was sexual desires and not money.”
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