Photo credit: Tony Webster – CC BY 2.0
Speculation has begun about sentencing after a New York jury found Donald Trump guilty on 34 counts of concealing hush money paid to porn actresses and falsifying business records to evade campaign finance regulations. Trump's outrageous behavior and slander against the district attorney, judge, witnesses and jury deserves a punitive sentence, including prison time, but it is highly unlikely that Trump will spend any time behind bars.
But for those who argue this is a first offense of white-collar crime, this ignores the long list of lies and fraud for which Trump and his business associates have already been convicted in civil lawsuits. Furthermore, given the credible allegations of rape and his conviction in the E. Jean Carroll defamation and sexual abuse lawsuit, Trump is clearly a repeat offender against numerous individuals and organizations.
Of course, Trump's political crimes constitute other serious crimes for which he has already been charged. Unfortunately, delays and the intervention of a politically compromised U.S. Supreme Court spared the Orange Blob from donning the orange suit of an incarcerated prisoner. Furthermore, because of an irresponsible Merrick Garland, Trump's charges of incitement of insurrection and attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election were not immediately prosecuted. Thus, Trump may avoid prison time for any of these political crimes.
While Trump rails against a “rigged” justice system, he has been treated with the freedoms and privileges appropriate to a wealthy white member of the ruling class. But more than a century ago, a presidential candidate was less fortunate than Trump when it came to what was considered justice during World War I. While the mainstream media may make oblique references to the 1920 Socialist presidential candidate who was incarcerated in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, it is important to look back at how Eugene V. Debs ended up receiving a 10-year prison sentence.
Debs, like the majority of members of the Socialist Party of America, opposed America's participation in World War I and denounced conscription as a means of providing “cannon fodder” for genocide. However, the presumption of constitutional freedom of speech was violated by the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. Under these laws, Wilson's Justice Department arrested hundreds of prominent opponents of the war and conscription. Indeed, when Debs visited Canton, Ohio in June 1918 to address the Ohio Socialist Party Convention, three party officials were already serving sentences for anti-war speeches and had been tortured in prison.
On June 16, 1918, Debs spoke to an audience of several thousand people, defending the right of free speech in wartime, even as he attempted to deliver a carefully crafted critique of conscription. Nonetheless, his speech contained enough material for a federal grand jury in Cleveland to indict him on June 29, 1918, for violating both the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act. At his trial in September 1918, he reminded the jury, made up of well-to-do residents of rural and small town Ohio, that the “right of free speech” should be protected “in time of war as well as in time of peace.” Debs made no secret of the fact that he opposed the war precisely because “the ruling classes make war on each other, and not on the people.”
Undeterred by Debs' arguments, the jury found her guilty on all charges and the judge sentenced her to 10 years in prison. Released on $10,000 bail (approximately $250,000 in today's dollars), Debs began an appeals process that reached the U.S. Supreme Court. In a unanimous decision on March 10, 1919, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. reaffirmed that Debs' Canton speech was “seditious.” A little over a month later, Debs was sent to a maximum security prison and transferred to the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary on June 14, 1919. From there, Debs won more than 900,000 votes in the 1920 presidential election.
After he was sent to prison, progressives and liberals, including AFL members, called on President Wilson to pardon Debs, but all such requests were rejected. When Warren Harding became president in 1921, there were even louder calls for amnesty for all those languishing in prison for their vocal opposition to World War I. Although Harding refused to grant amnesty, he did pardon Debs in December 1921 and commuted the remaining 10 years of his sentence.
It is hard to imagine Trump even going to prison for the felonies he allegedly committed, much less serving anywhere near the two and a half years Debs served. Moreover, if Trump somehow manages to retake the White House (and the arcane Electoral College is surely an anti-democratic trap), he could imagine self-pardoning federal crimes and overturning state crimes. Finally, given his professed intention to punish political opponents, deport immigrants en masse, and assemble his own “Justice” Department, the prospect of a Trump presidency is alarming.
