The judge overseeing Donald J. Trump’s criminal case in Manhattan postponed his sentencing until after Election Day, a significant victory for the former president as he seeks to overturn his conviction and win back the White House.
In a ruling on Friday, the judge, Juan M. Merchan, rescheduled the sentencing for Nov. 26, citing the “unique time frame this matter currently finds itself in.” He had previously planned to hand down Mr. Trump’s punishment on Sept. 18, just seven weeks before Election Day, when Mr. Trump will face off against Vice President Kamala Harris for the presidency.
“This is not a decision this court makes lightly but it is the decision which in this court’s view, best advances the interests of justice,” Justice Merchan wrote in the four-page ruling, which noted that “this matter is one that stands alone, in a unique place in this nation’s history.”
The judge appeared eager to skirt a swirl of partisan second-guessing in the campaign’s final stretch. Asserting that the court is a “fair, impartial and apolitical institution,” he said that “the integrity of our judicial system demands” that the sentencing be “free from distraction or distortion.”
It is unclear whether sentencing Mr. Trump in September would have helped or harmed him politically; his punishment could have been an embarrassing reminder of his criminal record, but could have also propelled his claims of political martyrdom.
Justice Merchan’s decision came at the request of Mr. Trump, who had asked to delay the sentencing, partly to win more time to challenge his conviction on charges that he falsified records to cover up a sex scandal. Prosecutors working for the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, who brought the case, had deferred to the judge, paving the way for at least a brief postponement.
The judge’s ruling Friday took a defensive tone, refusing to address some of Mr. Trump’s supporting arguments for a delay, which he described as a “litany of perceived and unsubstantiated grievances.”
He also vented frustration at Mr. Bragg’s pursuit of a middle ground, noting that despite the district attorney’s “stated neutrality,” his prosecutors’ filing had highlighted logistical challenges to a September sentencing and “seemingly supports” Mr. Trump’s bid to delay.
The judge’s decision is likely to infuriate Mr. Bragg’s liberal supporters and fuel accusations that Mr. Trump is above the law, shielded from the consequences of conviction, unlike any other felon.
To avoid that impression, left-leaning legal scholars — and Trump critics seeking catharsis — wanted Justice Merchan to hold the former president accountable promptly after he was convicted in May.
Mr. Trump, the first former American president to become a felon, faces up to four years in prison. Justice Merchan, however, could impose a shorter sentence or only probation.
His campaign did not celebrate the delay. Instead, it issued a statement saying “there should be no sentencing” at all in what it called an “election interference witch hunt.”
Mr. Trump’s request to postpone had posed an unparalleled predicament for the judge, who wrote in the ruling on Friday that he was still striving to treat Mr. Trump as he would any other defendant.
Mr. Trump, of course, was different: Not only was he running for president, but he hurled insults at the judge, sought to oust him from the case and leveled personal attacks on Justice Merchan’s daughter, a Democratic political consultant.
Justice Merchan propelled the case forward for more than a year — even as Mr. Trump sought to thwart it at every turn — and imposed a gag order on the former president that barred him from attacking witnesses, prosecutors and the judge’s own family.
In the Manhattan case, the only one of the indictments that has reached a trial, Mr. Trump’s lawyers spent months building a web of legal challenges that influenced, and at times contradicted, one another. There were pleas for delays. Requests to throw out the case. And long-shot maneuvers to switch the case to federal court.
Justice Merchan had already delayed the sentencing once at Mr. Trump’s request, at the beginning of the convoluted process.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers had asked to postpone the sentencing, originally set for July 11, so that Justice Merchan could consider their request to overturn the conviction based on a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision granting him broad immunity for official actions taken as president. Justice Merchan agreed to consider their request and to move the sentencing to Sept. 18.
But when Justice Merchan said he would rule on the immunity bid on Sept. 16, two days before the sentencing, Mr. Trump’s lawyers demanded yet another delay. The lawyers, Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, had argued that the judge’s timetable was too compressed.
Justice Merchan noted Friday that had he sentenced Mr. Trump in July as planned, “there would of course have been no cause for delay.” But Mr. Trump’s effort to apply the “historic and intervening decision” from the Supreme Court in the Manhattan case, he said, had necessitated a change.
Justice Merchan said that he would now rule on the immunity matter, which Mr. Trump argues should reverse his conviction, on Nov. 12, a week after the election. The new schedule will all but guarantee that Mr. Trump remains a felon when voters head to the polls.
The postponement, Justice Merchan wrote, should “dispel any suggestion that the court will have issued any decision or imposed sentence either to give an advantage to, or create a disadvantage for, any political party.”
Still, the delay will spare Mr. Trump a distraction — and humiliation — at a critical moment. Ms. Harris’s entry into the presidential race in July upended the campaign and erased the former president’s lead in the polls.
In a letter filed with the court, Mr. Trump’s lawyers implied that holding his sentencing just weeks before Election Day on Nov. 5 could improperly influence voters.
Prosecutors, while not opposing a delay, have said that the scheduling problems arose from Mr. Trump’s own “strategic and dilatory litigation tactics.” And they challenged Mr. Trump’s efforts to toss out the conviction based on the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, contending that the high court ruling had “no bearing” on the Manhattan prosecution and noting that Mr. Trump’s cover-up of the sex scandal was unrelated to his presidency.
“The evidence that he claims is affected by the Supreme Court’s ruling constitutes only a sliver of the mountains of testimony and documentary proof that the jury considered in finding him guilty,” the prosecutors wrote.
In May, a jury of 12 New Yorkers convicted Mr. Trump after a seven-week trial of all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal the sex scandal that threatened his 2016 presidential campaign.
The case stemmed from a hush-money payment to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, that Mr. Trump’s fixer, Michael D. Cohen, made shortly before the election. Mr. Trump eventually repaid Mr. Cohen, who became a star witness at the trial. And the former president, the jury found, carried out a scheme to use the false records to hide the nature of the reimbursement.
Soon after his conviction, Mr. Trump intensified his strategy of delay, which is something of a legal forte for the former president.
Mr. Trump had succeeded in postponing his Manhattan trial by three weeks, while managing to indefinitely delay trials in Washington and in Georgia, where he is accused of plotting to subvert democracy by refusing to accept his 2020 election defeat. (The Supreme Court’s immunity ruling stems from the Washington case.) Separately, a federal judge in Florida dismissed the case in which Mr. Trump was charged with mishandling classified documents.
Other stratagems failed. Mr. Trump recently sought to move his Manhattan case to federal court, his second attempt to do so. This time, he cited the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling. But the second attempt, like the first, was unsuccessful, with the judge again rejecting Mr. Trump’s argument that the case involved his official acts as president.
“Nothing in the Supreme Court’s opinion affects my previous conclusion that the hush money payments were private, unofficial acts, outside the bounds of executive authority,” the federal judge, Alvin K. Hellerstein, wrote in his opinion, which Mr. Trump is appealing.
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