New York Judge Juan M. Merchan said he wanted to avoid any appearance of letting political considerations affect his sentencing of Donald Trump in the hush money case for which the former president and current Republican nominee was found guilty earlier this year. Thus, the judge, whom Trump has accused of a Democratic bias, is accommodating Trump by waiting until after the November presidential election to announce his penalty.
By further delaying the sentencing — it was originally supposed to happen on July 11, then Sept. 18 and now Nov. 26 — Merchan is committing exactly the offense he said he was trying to avoid. He is letting politics determine the speed with which the criminal justice process is carried out.
The judge is also raising the prospect that the penalty he hands out could be impacted by whether Trump wins the election in November against Kamala Harris.
Neither Trump’s candidacy for president nor the outcome of this year’s contest would be a factor, though, if the justice system were operating blindly, as it is supposed to. His political ambitions would be as irrelevant as they would be for any other criminal defendant not running for president.
Trump is already counting on this year’s election results to save him from federal charges that accuse him of inciting the siege on the Capitol following his election defeat in 2020 and absconding with classified documents when he left the White House. Some have speculated that his decision to run again for president was motivated in part as a defense strategy, since if he wins, he will be able to order the Justice Department to drop those prosecutions.
Trump and his attorneys have been successful in delaying those two federal cases from coming to trial. They’ve done the same with a Georgia case that accuses Trump of conspiring with a number of his associates to overturn that state’s election results in 2020.
In New York, though, a trial was held and concluded. A jury unanimously convicted Trump on 34 felony counts for trying to hide, through fraudulent bookkeeping, the payments he authorized prior to the 2016 presidential election to keep a porn star quiet about their alleged affair. Efforts by Trump’s attorneys have been unsuccessful so far in getting that verdict overturned. Unless Merchan believes that a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in July on presidential immunity invalidated the state prosecutors’ case, there were no good legal reasons to further put off the sentencing.
The judge, in explaining his latest delay, emphasized that he was doing so to demonstrate that “the court is a fair, impartial and apolitical institution.” His action, though, contradicted those words. To let an election timetable dictate a court’s sentencing timetable is a political decision.
Merchan may still be fair and impartial, but apolitical he was not.
