President Elect Donald Trump received a historic sentence on Friday, January 10, from New York Judge Juan Merchan, where he avoided prison and instead received an “unconditional discharge” for his 34 felony convictions.
He appeared virtually from Florida for his sentencing Friday morning at the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse in New York City. The hearing was planned at the last minute so that the case could be concluded before Inauguration Day, and Trump’s frantic efforts to suspend his sentence were rejected by the New York State Court of Appeals and the US Supreme Court.
Before the sentencing, prosecutor Joshua Steinglass said that — while the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office ultimately recommended an unconditional discharge out of respect for the office of the presidency — he did not want to downplay Trump’s “baseless attacks” on the rule of law and his “coordinated campaign” to undermine the jury’s conclusion.
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Trump – who will be sworn in as US president for the second time on Monday, January 20 – has previously been found guilty of 12 jurors for falsifying several business records to cover up a plot to tilt the 2016 presidential election in his favor.
With the unanimous conviction, he became the first sitting or former US president to be convicted of a crime. His accusations sentenced to up to four years in prison at the court’s discretion.
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What is unconditional discharge?
When Judge Merchan set the date for Trump’s sentencing, he revealed that he had no intention of putting the president-elect behind bars. Instead, the judge suggested, “unconditional discharge appears to be the most feasible option to ensure finality and allow the defendant to pursue his appellate options.”
Unconditional discharge is effectively a non-punishment – a way that New York courts can recognize someone’s conviction as valid while releasing them “without jail time, fines or probation.”
The sentence is allowed to be handed out in cases where there appears to be “no practical purpose” in imposing restrictions on someone. Under New York law, judges must justify their decision if they choose to go that route.
Given Trump’s impending inauguration — and speculation that a sitting president’s sentence would still need to be suspended during his time in office — Merchan chose the path of least resistance with his sentence.
Despite declining to give Trump a sentence, Merchan’s final sentence isn’t exactly how the president-elect wanted things to play out: He’s still a convicted felon.
Still, with a verdict now issued and the case closed, Trump can finally appeal his sentence after seven months. His attorney said Friday he plans to do so.
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What was Trump convicted of?
Trump was convicted of 34 counts of falsifying business records on May 30, 2024, after spending more than six weeks on trial in Lower Manhattan.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office brought an unprecedented case against Trump that aimed to prove he didn’t just falsify financial records “with intent to defraud” — in this case, to mask a $130,000 cash payment made to the adult movie star Stormy Daniels in the final days of his 2016 presidential campaign — but that he did so to cover up a second offense, which raises the charges from misdemeanors to felonies.
By falsifying the records, the DA’s office argued, Trump more broadly sought to bury evidence of an illegal conspiracy to influence the 2016 election.
Popularly called Trump’s “German money” trial, given that Daniel’s hush money payment anchored the narrative, the Manhattan case went well beyond white-collar crimes. It was the first of four criminal cases brought against the former president in 2023 – three of which involved election interference.
Through hard evidence and exhaustive testimony, Manhattan prosecutors painted a portrait of a former reality TV star who illegally tilted a presidential election in his favor by conspiring with powerful friends to suppress information from voters.
Jurors’ guilty verdicts signaled that — beyond a reasonable doubt — the evidence presented to them supported the prosecutor’s story.
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Trump’s three other criminal cases never went to trial, but in unrelated civil lawsuits since he left the White House, Trump has been found liable for commits fraud while building his real estate empire as well as sexual abuse and slander previous Ella columnist E. Jean Carroll. Each of these cases carried significant fines.
