This bogus prosecution was given the further imprimatur of a formal sentencing with the blessing of various prestigious higher courts.

There was a lot of hue and cry about Donald Trump being sentenced today in state criminal court in lower Manhattan. But there was little practical effect: Trump showed up only by video and was given no sentence at all. In the end, none of it matters.

Now, that doesn’t mean that there was no wrong done to Trump. I’ve argued many times that the case against Trump for lying to his own checkbook was nonsensical, grounded in conspiracy theories, abusively handled, flatly barred by New York law in some ways and a perversion of it in others, and riddled with judicial bias and the trampling of Trump’s constitutional rights. It brings shame on everyone involved in bringing the case, permitting it to be tried, or publicly defending the prosecution. Moreover, as Andy McCarthy has covered exhaustively, there were serious new reasons to throw the case out after the Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity, given that the prosecution introduced evidence of presidential acts within the heart of the Court’s immunity doctrine and then told the jury in closing arguments that this evidence was “devastating” and essential to its proof on core elements of the offense.

So the case should have been dead long before it went this far.

All of that said, three appeals courts — the New York Appellate Division for the First Department, the New York Court of Appeals (the state’s highest court), and the U.S. Supreme Court — all declined to stop the sentencing from going forward. The Court issued a brief order explaining its 5–4 ruling, in which Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the three liberals:

First, the alleged evidentiary violations at President-Elect Trump’s state-court trial can be addressed in the ordinary course on appeal. Second, the burden that sentencing will impose on the President-Elect’s responsibilities is relatively insubstantial in light of the trial court’s stated intent to impose a sentence of “unconditional discharge” after a brief virtual hearing.

If you are, like me, concerned with the integrity of the law, this is frustrating because this bogus prosecution was given the further imprimatur of a formal sentencing with the blessing of various prestigious higher courts. If you are a partisan of Trump, this is frustrating because the last formality is concluded in favor of branding Trump a convicted felon. If you are a partisan of the prosecution itself, this is frustrating because the Court locked Acting Justice Juan Merchan into giving Trump a no-consequences non-sentence. But sometimes, the posture of a case means that a court isn’t asked to rule on the law, only on the practicalities. And that sometimes yields indecisive results, at least for a while, that are frustrating to everyone without being wrong.

The Supreme Court was probably right that it was fine to let the sentencing go forward, not because there is a likelihood of Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s case surviving on appeal, but precisely because a fully briefed and argued appeal is a better way to run through all the legal issues than an emergency application to an appeals court. The Court was probably right because there isn’t actually much harm or consequence to this sentencing. It consumed little of Trump’s time, at a point when he has yet to take office. There being no sentence, there’s no risk that the sentencing did anything that can result in Trump losing money or his liberty before he can appeal. And even the symbolic significance of having a felony conviction is pretty minor. Most non-lawyers considered him convicted when a jury convicted him, and it didn’t stop him from being elected president again anyway. New York City, the site of the conviction, swung further in Trump’s direction than just about anywhere else in the country compared with his popularity there before he was convicted. It just isn’t a big deal.

I’ve argued two related points about the endgame of this prosecution for some time now. One is that Merchan and Bragg were in a serious bind at the sentencing phase, and this would have been even more acute had it taken place before the election. The other is that Trump’s odds of getting his conviction overturned would depend to a large extent on his winning the election.

On the first point, it’s one thing to bring a hyper-technical charge of a victimless crime against a political opponent in order to score rhetorical points about calling him a felon; it’s another to impose consequences. Had Bragg and Merchan actually gotten Trump to face a jail sentence, they would have exposed even further the total lack of proportion or sanity in bringing these charges, as well as the prospect of either trying to jail a candidate to stop him from winning a national election, or jail the winner of an election to stop him from carrying out the office to which the citizenry elected him. Yet, if they chose a sentence with little or no bite, they were effectively admitting that they charged Trump with something a lot less serious than you’d think from the phrase “34 felony convictions.” Having let Trump off without even a fine or probation, they’ve effectively admitted that they didn’t have a crime worth punishing and/or they think their odds of surviving on appeal are dismal and they’re just now playing for face-saving moral victories.

On the second point, the legal merits of Trump’s appeal were always going to be strong. But it would have been quite difficult, had Trump lost the election, to reverse his conviction without effectively admitting that the New York legal system interfered with a national election by permitting the legally unjustified conviction of a major-party candidate. That’s a bitter pill for the state judicial system to swallow, and one that the appellate courts would dread announcing after seeing how Trump and his supporters reacted to the 2020 election. With Trump having won, it’s now a lot easier for the state courts to admit (as they may yet admit as well in the New York Attorney General’s civil suit, still pending before the First Department) that Trump was subjected to an abuse of the law.