Allen Weisselberg, the former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, was recently sentenced to five months in jail after he pleaded guilty to 15 felonies last August. That’s a pretty sweet deal, especially when you factor in that he’s likely to get out in 100 days. In fact, even the judge said it was a lighter sentence than Weisselberg deserved. Weisselberg will also pay $2 million in back taxes, interest, and penalties.
Weisselberg’s charges involved the vast amounts of off-the-books compensation—including a luxury apartment, leased Mercedes-Benzes, and private school tuition for his grandchildren—he took as part of the Trump Organization’s broader tax fraud. He even fabricated a payroll check to his wife to help her qualify for Social Security. Weisselberg’s light sentence was part of a deal, but again, it was a pretty sweet one: He testified against the Trump Organization, but he remained loyal to the individual Trumps, taking personal blame for “my own greed.” His loyalty was such that the Trumps kept him on paid leave at the company. Does that sound like he cooperated enough with the prosecution to earn a five-month sentence?
It’s safe to say that most people who commit 15 felonies get more than five months. Weisselberg’s sentence highlights the deep inequity of the U.S. court and prison systems. Let’s compare his sentence to some others.E
Is Eliza Orlins just a really bad defense attorney, or is something else going on here? Hmmm …
Also in New York City, Kalief Browder—a teenager who had allegedly stolen a backpack but hadn’t been tried or convicted—spent more than 1,000 days imprisoned at Rikers Island, where Weisselberg will serve his 100 or so days. Much of Browder’s time on Rikers was spent in solitary confinement, and he was assaulted by both inmates and staff. He died by suicide about two years after he was finally released. A thousand days for a crime he wasn’t convicted of versus Weisselberg’s probable 100 days for the 15 felonies he admitted.
The 19 people who died in custody at Rikers in 2022 included a man who, like Browder, had not yet been tried, but had been imprisoned for three years awaiting trial on a robbery charge. They included a man who had been imprisoned for more than a year after allegedly committing assault while having a mental health crisis; he was supposed to be on suicide watch but was left unattended. It goes on—and while the 19 deaths in the Rikers Island jail complex in 2022 are a scandal, it’s also a scandal that people are being held for years without trial while people like Weisselberg get five months maximum.
Even some fairly prominent people have gotten noticeably harsher sentences than Weisselberg:
There are massive racial and wealth disparities threaded through everything about the so-called justice system in the United States, but every now and then there’s a case that just shows so clearly how advantageous it is to be white and wealthy (even if a good chunk of the wealth was illegal in some way) and connected to power that you have to stop and marvel at it.
Also relevant here is how our system doesn’t treat white-collar crime as real crime, even though in many cases it has more victims who experience more harm than in cases of individual acts of theft or even assault. If there’s one kind of mass incarceration I would cheer, it’s mass incarceration of white-collar criminals.
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