Should Trump Be Sentenced to Prison? Two Opposing Views.

Now that Donald Trump has been convicted on 34 felony counts, his sentencing hearing looms on July 11. Below are two legal experts weighing in on the critical question of whether Mr. Trump ought to receive a prison sentence.

The Case for Prison Time for Trump

By Norman Eisen

Having witnessed every day of Donald Trump’s criminal trial for falsifying business records to conceal a sex scandal that threatened his presidential campaign, I strongly believe the former president should be sentenced to incarceration.

I am a lawyer, not a judge, but I have practiced criminal law for over three decades. Under New York law, sentencing should be based on the gravity of the crime — and the 34 offenses on which Mr. Trump has now been convicted are profoundly serious. To find him guilty of felony business record falsification, the jury had to determine that he intended to commit, aid or conceal a second crime by making or causing false entries.

Jurors were given only one option for that second offense. That was the payment of hush money to hide damaging information, “a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election” under New York’s criminal code. Joshua Steinglass, one of the prosecutors, underscored the significance of that in his closing argument, telling jurors, “Democracy gives people the right to elect their leaders, but that rests on the premise that the voters have access to accurate information about the candidates.” Mr. Trump sought “to deny that access, to manipulate and defraud the voters, to pull the wool over their eyes in a coordinated fashion,” Mr. Steinglass said.

Because the legitimacy of our entire system of government rests on free and fair elections, this offense is deserving of punishment.

Sentences should take into account outcomes in comparable cases. When Justice Juan Merchan sentences Mr. Trump, he will do so against a backdrop of many other defendants who have been convicted of this felony. My research for a book about the case, “Trying Trump: A Guide to His First Election Interference Criminal Trial,” included examining almost 10,000 prosecutions for falsifying business records in New York since 2015. In the most serious of these cases, about 10 percent of the total, incarceration was imposed. Mr. Trump’s assault on our democracy is as serious as or more serious than any of those others. My research also showed that first-time offenders like Mr. Trump are not exempt from sentences of incarceration, nor should they be if, like the former president, their offense is serious enough.