MILWAUKEE- He may be the first person to hold the highest office in the United States to be a felon, but it’s not a guarantee Donald Trump will become the first former President to spend time in federal prison.
Defense Attorney Julius Kim, of the law firm Kim & Lavoy and former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Janine Geske both tell WTMJ it’s possible, albeit unlikely Trump will be sentenced to prison after he was found guilty of falsifying business records to cover up an affair with adult film actress Stormy Daniels.
“We don’t have any history to go off of in terms of what type of punishment someone should get for this type of situation, especially a person that is situated like Donald Trump being a former President of the United States,” Kim told Wisconsin’s Afternoon News. “His character can be considered in sentencing him (Trump). So whether that hurts him ultimately, or helps him ultimately, is something that Judge Merchan is going to have to decide.”
Geske, who served as a Justice on the State Supreme Court from 1993 to 1998, says the process of putting a former President in prison would be a logistical nightmare that would have to include arrangements for the US Secret Service to monitor and provide protection for him.
“The enormity of trying to incarcerate a former President with the Secret Service is going to weigh against incarcerating,” Geske said. “It’s worse than a white collar crime, but it is a white collar crime where you don’t have a specific victim, he has no prior record, and I think that there may be conditions and they may put him on supervision for a period of time, but I really don’t think that the government is going to incarcerate him. That would cause such problems, not to mention what it would do the country to have him booked and put into a cell somewhere.”
A sentencing date has been set for July 11th, four days before the start of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. Trump’s lawyers are expected to appeal today’s conviction, which could delay sentencing for an unidentified amount of time.
