Donald Trump’s lawyers are paving a path to appeal his conviction after the former president was found guilty in his historic hush money trial.
A New York jury on Thursday found Trump guilty of all 34 counts of falsifying money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and he will be sentenced on July 11.
Trump’s legal team is expected to appeal, but the unprecedented conviction triggers a process that all convicted criminals face within Manhattan’s criminal justice system.
The ruling will begin a 30-day period for the former president to file an appeal, a lengthy process that some legal experts say will be an uphill battle for Trump.
‘This is all uncharted territory, as far as an appellate question is concerned. I certainly don’t think there has ever been a prosecution for falsification of business records like this,” said Barry Kamins, a retired judge and professor at Brooklyn Law School. The New York Times.
Donald Trump’s lawyers are preparing a path to appeal his conviction after the former president was found guilty on Thursday.
Trump vowed to fight his conviction on Friday and outlined two areas his team will raise in the appeal: the location of the trial and the judge.
‘We wanted a change of venue where we could have a fair trial. We didn’t get it. “We wanted a judge who had no conflicts,” he said.
Mark Zauderer, a New York lawyer and member of a committee that reviews appeal requests, told the Times that it will be difficult for Trump’s team to achieve a successful appeal based on the judge.
‘This case has none of the usual red flags for reversal on appeal. “The judge’s conduct was impeccable,” Zauderer said.
During the five-week trial, prosecutors spoke of a plot by Trump to “corrupt” the 2016 election by hiding a $130,000 payment from his “fixer” Michael Cohen to porn star Stormy Daniels.
Daniels alleged that she and Trump had sex a decade earlier, which he has denied.
The case featured explosive evidence from Daniels and exposed the “catch-and-kill” practices of the National Enquirer tabloid, which bought stories that could be damaging to Trump and suppressed them.
But the actual criminal charges concern something more prosaic: the refunds Trump signed for Cohen for the payment.
The refunds, paid by Trump in monthly installments, were recorded as legal expenses.
Prosecutors say it was a fraudulent label designed to conceal the purpose of the hush money transaction and unlawfully interfere in the 2016 election.
Defense attorneys argued that Cohen actually performed substantial legal work for Trump and his family and was paid for it.
Another avenue Trump’s lawyers could pursue is to challenge the notion that Trump caused a false entry in the records of “a company.”
A New York jury found Trump guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels.
His lawyers could argue that they were Trump’s personal documents and not his company’s.
Another way would be to question the legal theory of the prosecution for the crime of conspiracy against the electoral law that required the judge to give the jury complicated instructions,
“The more complex the jury instructions are, the more likely they are to affect appellate issues,” Nathaniel Z. Marmur, a New York appellate lawyer, told the Times. “And these are some of the most complex instructions one can imagine.”
Trump’s next step will be to appeal to the Appellate Division, First Department, to try to overturn his conviction on 34 counts.
Following their ruling, Trump’s team or prosecutors could ask the state’s highest court, the New York Court of Appeals, to review the decision.
The last option would be for the former president’s team to ask the United States Supreme Court to examine the case.
“This is a run-of-the-mill state court conviction, I don’t see a plausible path to the Supreme Court,” Zauderer said.
Still, Trump’s team has not ruled out trying to take the case to the US Supreme Court, which decided to intervene in his election interference case in Washington, DC, hearing his claims for presidential immunity.
Any type of appeal is unlikely before the 2024 election, where Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, will face President Joe Biden.
Biden even addressed Trump’s right to appeal during his remarks at the White House, where he defended the jury process and condemned Trump’s “reckless” decision to call the trial “rigged just because he doesn’t like the verdict.”
He said Trump has the “opportunity to appeal that decision just as everyone else has that opportunity.” “That’s how the American system works,” he said.