I didn’t even read the article because the headline sucks and I’m suspecting it’s one of these where it adds up the years for each charge. However, sentences for these things are usually served concurrently as opposed to consecutively.
But the real answer is that if it’s anything over 10 years it’s basically a life sentence for him, which is just fine with me.
On a side note, what a self own. All he had to do was give the documents back when asked and not lie to his own lawyers. But I guess asking him not to lie is a pretty tall order.
Clearly we need a “Saved You A Click” community… this article’s title sucks and it takes way too long to get to the point.
The answer is 12.5 to 22 years.
For a defendant with no prior criminal convictions, an offense level of 37 yields 210 to 262 months (17 1/2 to almost 22 years). A defendant who accepted responsibility could reduce that range to 151 to 188 months if the prosecution agreed to deduct the third point.
Given that Trump will never accept responsibility and given the horrible charges, he’d likely get closer to 20 years.
Even that would be a death sentence for him. To go from being used to luxury for 77 years to federal prison (even minimum security) would be a massive shock. And given his poor diet, I don’t he’d live to be released when he’s 97.
Of course, the other way Trump differs from any normal person who committed these offenses is that the normal person would be awaiting their trial from behind bars instead of posting on social media and holding rallies.
Of course, the other way Trump differs from any normal person who committed these offenses is that the normal person would be awaiting their trial from behind bars instead of posting on social media and holding rallies.
Meh, probably not. Most non-violent offenders, even in the federal system, are released on bail (or a similar form of supervised release) prior to trial. No chance of reoffending since he’d not have access to new classified info. No real flight risk ((1) because he’s too much of a narcissist, (2) because he’s easily tracked).
If he goes to prison he is dead anyway, the people in prisons tend to not like politicians that made death sentence for drug offenses a thing…
Apparently he would keep the secret service protection, although this is uncharted waters for sure. Opening Arguments podcast OA758: Re-Indicted And It Feels So Good! seems to agree.
Meh. (1) trump will have a very special incarceration, probably some form of isolation so that he is protected. (2) I think there will probably be secret service protection (could you imagine that assignment!). (3) he signed the First Step Act, which actually reduced federal incarceration by quite a bit
If he does go in how will it work with secret service as former presidents get “protection” for life? Are the agents going to be living in prison with him?
I don’t think anyone has a firm grasp on how this would work considering that no former President has ever gone to prison before. (Especially not since the Secret Service started protecting them.) We’re in uncharted territory here.
I know it would never happen, but just thinking about him getting 20+ years brings a smile to my face. It’s too bad that throwing him into a flaming bronze bull and sacrificing him to Baal isn’t an option.
I’m a cynical bastard and Trump is rich and powerful. So my predicted outcome will most likely be parole or some form of house arrest where he can lay around all day and moan on social media about witch hunts or something.
I think the most likely outcome is it will end in multiple hung juries because the US has a population of brainwashed pro-Trump sycophants who are going into this with a preset belief that it is political persecution.
Let’s make some assumptions and model the chances mathematically:
- Based on recent surveys, about 38% of the US-population believe that Trump is being persecuted. One might hope they might listen to the evidence and change their mind, but let’s assume they don’t, and so assume 38% will never vote to convict Trump no matter what evidence is presented. We’ll assume this 38% is the same for the jury pool (in some local areas, maybe this is pessimistic, so if anyone has a more accurate assumption, perhaps the calculations could be re-run with that). We’ll assume after hearing the evidence, the remaining 62% will vote to convict (this is not intended to pre-judge the result, but rather to show what will happen if the prosecution can present a strong and persuasive case against Trump).
- Let’s assume a jury of 12 people, but they go through the standard voir dire process where jurors are called sequentially in an order neither party controls, but the defence (but not the prosecution) can strike up to 10 jurors, until a jury of 12 is formed.
- Let’s assume Trump has perfect information about which jurors are in the 38% (they can find out who is registered as a Republican, read social media, ask questions jurors are compelled to answer, etc…), and will exercise strikes on anyone not in the 38% until they run out of strikes or 12 jurors are selected.
- Let’s assume 12 jurors need to vote unanimously to convict or to acquit. We’ll assume that if neither vote happens, it is a hung jury, and that there can be at most 3 trials (2 retrials following hung juries) before it is untenable to re-prosecute.
Firstly, what is the chance of a complete acquittal? We can use the negative binomial distribution to calculate this. Let’s consider the Voir Dire process, and define each juror being successively presented as a Bernoulli trial. We’ll define success (to use standard Bernoulli trial terminology, no moral judgement implied) as the juror being from the 38% that are Trump sycophants, and failure as them being from the other population. The probability of 11 or fewer successes before at most 10 failures can be computed using the negative binomial CDF, nbinom.cdf(k=11, n=10, p=0.38), giving a probability of 24.5% of outright acquittal per trial.
But what about the chance of a conviction, i.e. selection of a jury of 12 from the 62%? Even with no voir dire, the binomial distribution gives us a probability of 0.003% of no Trump supporters being in a jury of 12, so the chance of there being none is vanishingly small.
However, apparently the prosecution gets 5 strikes. This is getting difficult to compute the distribution, so I simulated it instead, assuming that the prosecution use on of their 5 strikes, until they run out, and the defence use on of their 10 strikes, until they run out. The result (from 10,000 simulated trials) was 96.6% ended in mistrial, 2.54% convicted, and 0.85% acquitted.
Once we factor in up to two retrials following a hung jury mistrial, it comes out as 90.28% never get a result, 7.45% get a conviction, and 2.27% end in him being acquitted.
However, it is quite sensitive to population differences. If he is tried in an area with a low population of sycophant potential jurors (26% instead of 38%) it comes out at a 59% chance of a guilty verdict across the retrials. If Trump sycophants are more likely to be jurors and make up 45% of the pool, then there is only a 1% chance of a conviction.
This argues in favour of not prosecuting, right? As with “any other defendant”, the likelihood of securing a conviction is an important consideration — it’s just that the calculation is very different with such a high-profile and divisive figure. Nobody really benefits from Trump going to prison and the trials would cost a fortune. Better to bankrupt him with tax proceedings.