NEW YORK: A New York judge is scheduled to decide this week whether President-elect Donald Trump’s criminal conviction on charges related to secret payments to a porn star should be overturned in light of the US Supreme Court’s July ruling on presidential immunity.
Judge Juan Merchan said he would make his decision by Tuesday. This is the first of two pivotal choices that the judge must make after Trump wins the election on November 5. Merchan must also decide whether to go ahead with Trump’s sentencing on November 26 as currently scheduled. Legal experts said the ruling was unlikely to be issued now before Trump’s inauguration on January 20.
A favorable ruling for Trump on the immunity issue or a deferral of judgment would pave the way for him to return to the White House largely unencumbered by any of the four criminal cases that once seemed to threaten his ambitions to regain the White House.
Officials at the US Justice Department are evaluating how to close the two federal criminal cases brought against Trump by special counsel Jack Smith over its long-standing policy against prosecuting a sitting president. A separate case in Georgia involving state-level criminal charges related to Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 presidential election loss remains in limbo.
Trump, 78, pleaded not guilty and denied any wrongdoing in the four cases, which he portrayed as political persecution by allies of Democratic President Joe Biden with the aim of thwarting his campaign.
“It is now abundantly clear that Americans want an immediate end to the weaponization of our justice system,” Trump campaign spokesman Stephen Cheung said in a statement on Friday.
Trump in May became the first US president to be convicted of a crime when a Manhattan jury found him guilty of falsifying business records to cover up a potential sex scandal shortly before his first presidential victory in 2016. Trump has vowed to appeal. Conviction after sentencing.
His lawyers said the case should be dismissed after the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling.
The Supreme Court, in a decision stemming from one of the two cases Smith v. Trump, held that presidents are immune from prosecution for their official acts, and that evidence of official acts cannot be presented to juries in personal conduct trials. This was the first time that the court recognized any degree of presidential immunity from prosecution.
Trump’s lawyers said the jury that convicted Trump showed prosecutors evidence of his social media posts as president and heard testimony from his former aides about conversations that took place in the White House during his 2017-2021 term.
Prosecutors in the office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat, said the Supreme Court ruling had no impact on the case, which they said involved “entirely casual conduct.” In its ruling, the Supreme Court did not find any immunity for any unofficial actions of the president.
“Even if the judge had found that some evidence should not have been presented, that would not have changed the outcome of the jury’s decision, and so the court would not have dismissed the case on that basis,” the New York Law School professor said. Anna Kominsky said.
Even if Merchan allows the conviction to stand, experts expect Trump’s lawyers to ask the judge to postpone sentencing. Trump faces up to four years in prison after being convicted of 34 criminal charges. Legal experts said that although lesser penalties such as fines or probation were possible, a prison sentence would not be impossible.