It wasn’t surprising when Judge Juan Merchan on Friday postponed Donald Trump’s New York state sentencing until after the presidential election. After all, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office all but agreed with Trump’s delay request.
But Merchan not only set a new sentencing date for Nov. 26, pushing it back most recently from Sept. 18. The judge also pushed back the date for ruling on Trump’s motion to set aside his guilty verdicts based on the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling, from Sept. 16 to Nov. 12.
But this new schedule risks even further delay.
When Trump’s lawyers asked Merchan last month to push back the sentencing, they told him that if he ruled on Sept. 16 against Trump’s immunity claim, then they were immediately going to seek to challenge his ruling on appeal before any sentencing could take place. “The requested adjournment is also necessary to allow President Trump adequate time to assess and pursue state and federal appellate options in response to any adverse ruling,” they wrote, adding that “a single business day is an unreasonably short period of time for President Trump to seek to vindicate these rights.”
Putting aside whether Trump’s immunity claim in the so-called hush money case has any merit, it’s true that, had Merchan rejected that claim on Sept. 16 while keeping the Sept. 18 sentencing, there was a good chance that that sentencing wouldn’t have happened as scheduled. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office effectively agreed with that notion, writing to Merchan last month that:
Assuming that defendant seeks an interim stay of the sentencing hearing immediately after this Court’s September 16 ruling, the People respectfully note that an appellate court considering such a request will understand that, without an interim stay, it would have to receive briefing and decide certain issues of first impression in one day.
So it made some sense for Merchan to delay the sentencing. That is, it made sense as much as anything can after the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling in the federal election interference case. That ruling shouldn’t have called into question Trump’s state prosecution for covering up a private hush money scheme, but here we are.
So the decision to push to November a ruling on Trump’s motion to set aside his guilty verdicts means that, if Merchan rules against Trump at that point, Trump’s appellate challenges will still need to play out; that’s his lawyers’ stated intention, at least. There’s now more space between that ruling and sentencing — from Sept. 16 and 18 to Nov. 12 and 26, respectively.
Would it take less than two weeks to address Trump’s challenges before his state sentencing could go forward? Especially if those challenges include a trip to the Supreme Court, whose immunity ruling helped Trump get to this point? We won’t know the answer until after the election — again, that’s if Merchan rejects Trump’s immunity claim — and much else can happen between now and then, legally and politically.
But whatever happens at the ballot box, we shouldn’t carve this new sentencing date into stone just yet, however delayed it has already been.
Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for updates and expert analysis on the top legal stories. The newsletter will return to its regular weekly schedule when the Supreme Court’s next term kicks off in October.
Leave a Reply