Opinion editor's note: Star Tribune Opinion publishes a mix of national and local commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here . ••• Norman Eisen: The case for prison time for Trump 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 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.
" Trump sought "to deny that access, to manipulate and defraud the voters, to pull the wool over their eyes in a coordinate.