President-elect\u00a0Donald Trump<\/a>\u00a0received a historic sentence on Friday, Jan. 10, from New York Judge Juan Merchan, dodging jail time and instead getting “unconditional discharge” for his 34 felony convictions.<\/p>\n He appeared virtually from Florida for his sentencing on Friday morning at the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse in New York City. The hearing was\u00a0scheduled at the last minute<\/a>\u00a0so that the case could get closure before Inauguration Day, and Trump’s frantic attempts to cancel his sentencing were rejected by the New York State Court of Appeals and U.S. Supreme Court.<\/p>\n Before the sentence was handed down, prosecutor Joshua Steinglass said that \u2014 while the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office ultimately recommended unconditional discharge out of respect for the office of the presidency \u2014 he did not want to downplay Trump’s “unsubstantiated attacks” on the rule of law and his “coordinated campaign” to undermine the jury’s conclusion.<\/p>\n Trump \u2014 who will be sworn in as United States president for a second time on Monday, Jan. 20 \u2014 was previously found guilty by\u00a012 jurors<\/a>\u00a0of falsifying several business records to conceal a plot to tilt the 2016 presidential election in his favor.<\/p>\n With the unanimous guilty verdict, he became the first sitting or former U.S. president to be convicted of a crime. His charges\u00a0carried up to four years in prison<\/a>\u00a0at the court’s discretion.<\/p>\n Donald Trump appears virtually from Florida for the sentencing hearing on Jan. 10, 2025.<\/span><\/p>\n ANGELA WEISS\/POOL\/AFP via Getty<\/p>\n When Judge Merchan set Trump’s sentencing date, he revealed that he did not intend to put the president-elect behind bars. Instead, the judge suggested, “unconditional discharge<\/a>\u00a0appears to be the most viable option to ensure finality and allow Defendant to pursue his appellate options.”<\/p>\n Unconditional discharge is, in effect, a non-punishment \u2014 a way that New York courts can acknowledge someone’s conviction as valid while simultaneously releasing them “without imprisonment, fine or probation supervision.”<\/p>\n The sentence is allowed to be handed out in cases where there appears to be “no proper purpose” for imposing restrictions upon someone. Judges are required by New York law to provide reasoning for their decision if they choose to go that route.<\/p>\n Considering Trump’s imminent inauguration \u2014 and speculation that a sitting president’s sentence would need to be paused during their time in office anyway \u2014 Merchan chose the path of least resistance with his sentence.<\/p>\n Despite declining to give Trump a punishment, Merchan’s final judgment is not exactly how the president-elect wanted things to play out: He remains a convicted felon.<\/p>\n Still, with a sentence now issued and the case closed, Trump can finally pursue a proper appeal of his verdict after seven months. His attorney said on Friday that he plans to.<\/p>\n Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records on May 30, 2024, after spending\u00a0more than six weeks on trial<\/a>\u00a0in Lower Manhattan.<\/p>\n The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office brought an unprecedented case against Trump that aimed to prove he not only falsified financial records “with intent to defraud” \u2014 in this instance, to mask a $130,000 hush money payment made to adult film star\u00a0Stormy Daniels<\/a>\u00a0in the final days of his 2016 presidential campaign \u2014 but that he did so in order to conceal a second crime, which elevates the charges from misdemeanors to felonies.<\/p>\n In falsifying the records, the DA’s office argued, Trump was more broadly attempting to bury evidence of an illegal conspiracy to influence the 2016 election.<\/p>\n Colloquially called Trump’s “hush money” trial, given that Daniels’ hush money payment anchored the narrative, the Manhattan case went far beyond white-collar crime. It was the first of four criminal cases brought against the former president in 2023 \u2014 three of which hit on themes of election interference.<\/p>\n Through hard evidence and exhaustive witness testimony, Manhattan prosecutors painted a portrait of a former reality TV star who unlawfully tilted a presidential election in his favor by\u00a0conspiring with powerful friends\u00a0to suppress information from voters.<\/p>\n Jurors’ guilty verdict signaled that \u2014 beyond a reasonable doubt \u2014 the evidence presented to them supported the prosecution’s story.<\/p>\n Never miss a story \u2014 sign up for\u00a0PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter<\/a>\u00a0to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer.<\/strong><\/p>\n Trump’s three other criminal cases never went to trial, but in unrelated civil lawsuits since leaving the White House, Trump has been found liable of\u00a0committing fraud while building his real estate empire<\/a>\u00a0as well as\u00a0sexually abusing<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0defaming<\/a>\u00a0former\u00a0Elle<\/em>\u00a0columnist\u00a0E. Jean Carroll<\/a>. Each of those cases carried\u00a0substantial fines<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The president-elect’s historic sentencing on Friday, Jan. 10, did not result in any real penalty for his crimes President-elect\u00a0Donald Trump\u00a0received a historic sentence on Friday, Jan. 10, from … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17938,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usdailys.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17936","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usdailys.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usdailys.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usdailys.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usdailys.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17936"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/usdailys.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17936\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17939,"href":"https:\/\/usdailys.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17936\/revisions\/17939"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usdailys.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/17938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usdailys.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usdailys.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usdailys.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"US](\"https:\/\/people.com\/thmb\/PotngMIsB83VD8tmTA7xK0WAGa8=\/4000x0\/filters:no_upscale():max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(1001x348:1003x350):format(webp)\/Trump-Notre-Dame-120724-01-b4f8298ee77e4ecd9337895278dada21.jpg\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>![\"US](\"https:\/\/people.com\/thmb\/or3_GFZs1-_1tBSnmZgAG_AWhS8=\/4000x0\/filters:no_upscale():max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(1701x538:1703x540):format(webp)\/Donald-Trump-appears-remotely-for-a-sentencing-hearing-in-front-of-New-York-State-Judge-Juan-Merchan-011025-0816b714da8144fba51858c5b9812a6e.jpg\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>\nWhat is unconditional discharge?<\/span><\/h3>\n
![\"Former](\"https:\/\/people.com\/thmb\/xCwyEMM3TvBSkE6b1tI7IysmENA=\/4000x0\/filters:no_upscale():max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(1234x386:1236x388):format(webp)\/trump-nyc-courthouse-2-040924-5bf9bde37bfc400398f758a8e99380cd.jpg\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>What did Trump get convicted for?<\/span><\/h3>\n