Former president Donald Trump reportedly asked a New York judge on Monday to delay his sentencing and toss his recent conviction for falsifying business records after the Supreme Court ruled that he is immune from prosecution for official actions he took as president.
In an unreleased letter, Trump’s lawyers requested that Judge Juan Merchan allow them to make arguments for pushing back his July 11 sentencing and throwing out the verdict, according to a Bloomberg report Monday evening. The letter will not be made public until Tuesday at the earliest, according to Bloomberg.
The move comes after the Supreme Court ruled Monday morning that Trump is immune from criminal prosecution for official acts taken while in office, but not unofficial ones. The case involved special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of the former president for attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election and his alleged role in the January 6 Capitol riot.
The 6–3 decision, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing for the majority, distinguished between the president’s public and private actions and returned the case to a lower court.
“Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. There is no immunity for unofficial acts,” Roberts wrote.
Trump could face up to four years in prison after he was convicted in May on 34 felony charges of falsifying business records, making him the first former president in U.S. history to be convicted of a crime.
It’s unclear how Trump’s lawyers might argue how the high court’s recent ruling changes the case. Trump was not yet president when the hush-money payments were made ahead of the 2016 election. But Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg cited evidence from Trump’s White House term, and Roberts’s opinion states that prosecutors cannot use evidence related to official acts a president takes while in office.