(NewsSpace.com) – Former President Donald Trump was recently convicted of 34 federal charges and was due for sentencing in just a few days. However, he also has other cases pending. He’s trying to have some of the charges against him dismissed, saying they were official acts of his office at the time and therefore he has presidential immunity. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court and now it has issued a ruling.
On Monday, July 1, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that “Congress may not criminalize the president’s conduct in carrying out the responsibilities of the executive branch under the Constitution.” The ruling means the case returns to the lower courts for them to determine which acts were carried out in an official capacity—those that receive immunity—and which were not—those that are potentially prosecutable. It also had the effect of postponing the sentencing hearing for the hush money case until September.
There was a bit of discord between the concurring and dissenting opinions, written by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Sonia Sotomayor, respectively.
In her opinion, Sotomayor said that acts committed by a president while in office could certainly be introduced as evidence. Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote a separate concurring opinion to Roberts’ and agreed with her liberal counterpart on that matter. She said in matters of “charges alleging a quid pro quo, the jury must be allowed to hear about both the quid and the quo, even if the quo, standing alone, could not” be used against the president.
Coney Barrett also noted in her concurring opinion that she sees Trump’s alleged actions in trying to organize alternative elector slates as private conduct, not an act of his office, and therefore he’s not entitled to immunity under that guise.
The matter now falls into the hands of Judge Tanya Chutkan who initially ruled that Trump being president doesn’t entitle him to a “lifelong get-out-of-jail-free pass.”
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