Supreme Court Rejects Trump‘s Bid to Block Sentencing in Stormy Daniels Case
The Supreme Court has rejected Donald Trump’s emergency request to halt the sentencing in the Stormy Daniels hush money case, paving the way for the former president to receive his punishment on Friday morning.
In a 5-4 vote, the majority conservative court upheld the decision of Judge Juan Merchan of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, who is set to announce the sentence at 9:00 AM.
Trump, 78, was found guilty in May of 34 counts of falsifying business records related to the $130,000 payment made to Daniels, a pornographic film actress, to keep quiet about an alleged affair before the 2016 election. Trump has consistently denied the relationship.
The former president’s legal team made a last-ditch effort on Wednesday, filing an urgent appeal with the Supreme Court after a New York state appeals court denied his attempt to delay the sentencing. However, the high court’s decision leaves Trump with no further legal recourse to stop the sentencing.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg had urged the Supreme Court to reject Trump’s petition, arguing that the case was a straightforward matter of state criminal law and that the Supreme Court lacked jurisdiction to intervene.
Trump’s lawyers had argued that the former president should be granted immunity from the case, claiming that his status as a sitting president at the time of the alleged offense should extend to him as a president-elect. Bragg dismissed this argument, stating that Trump was a private citizen when he was accused, tried, and convicted of "wholly unofficial conduct."
Merchan has indicated that he plans to give Trump a "straightforward discharge," a rarely used legal maneuver that would maintain Trump’s guilty plea without imposing any jail time, fine, or probation. This move is seen as an attempt to bring the matter to a close.
Despite the impending sentencing, Trump is set to be inaugurated as the 46th U.S. president on January 20, becoming the first president in history to assume office with a criminal conviction.
The sentencing marks the culmination of the only criminal trial Trump has faced among the four cases in which he was initially indicted.
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