Judge Juan M. Merchan has decided to postpone the judgment in the Stormy Daniels case, scheduled for September 18, until after the November 5 presidential election. This means that Americans will have to go to the polls without knowing whether Republican candidate Donald Trump will end up behind bars, since he risks up to 4 years in prison in this case. The three other cases in which the former US president is accused have also been postponed until after the presidential election.
In May, the jury in the case unanimously ruled that Trump was guilty of all 34 criminal charges he faced for falsifying porn star Stormy Daniels’ payment records in exchange for her silence. However, the New York court’s decision was postponed until July after Trump’s defense appealed the partial immunity for presidential actions that the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in June.
Merchan was originally scheduled to release his decision on July 11, but it was postponed until September 18 at the request of the former president’s defense team. The mogul’s legal team again asked for the sentencing to be delayed until after the election, arguing that the decision could be seen as a form of election interference in the presidential race, in which Trump is facing Democrat Kamala Harris.
The request to postpone the judgment once again put Judge Merchan in a difficult position: if he proceeded with the publication of the judgment on September 18, he would run the risk of being accused by Trump and his supporters of interfering in the presidential election; if he postponed the resolution, he was criticized for favoring the Republican.
When Trump was convicted in the Stormy Daniels case last May in New York, many questions were raised, including whether a convicted person could run for president of the country – the answer is yes. Now, after the judge’s decision on Friday, there is no possibility that Trump will end up behind bars before November 5. Sentencing will not be known until November 26, three weeks after the election in which the former president aspires to return to the White House.
