Paul Manafort’s prison sentence of less than four years on bank- and tax-fraud charges was widely called a light sentence, but a review all 452 similar cases nationwide in fiscal 2018 show President Trump’s former campaign chairman received a sentence somewhat stiffer than other federal defendants, reports the Washington Post. The average prison sentence in such bank-fraud cases was about 31 months, 16 months shorter than Manafort’s 47 months, found an analysis of court data maintained by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). Manafort, who was convicted by a jury, fared much better compared with other defendants also convicted by federal juries. The average sentence for those trials, 22 in all, was 98 months.
The TRAC database allows users only to compare cases with the same lead charge, the count a prosecutor deems the most important. Each defendant may also have been convicted of other charges that could affect the length of the sentence imposed. The review found a wide disparity between federal sentences in cases like Manafort’s, with some defendants receiving no prison time and others receiving sentences several times longer than Manafort’s. The vast majority of cases ended with defendants pleading guilty. Judge T. S. Ellis appeared to find persuasive cases cited by Manafort’s attorneys in which major tax evaders got little or no prison time. Matthew Hicks, who represented three of those defendants, said that “all involved substantial cooperation.” Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) said the court system treats white-collar crime too lightly, comparing with a man in Mississippi who got a 12-year-prison sentence for having marijuana in his car. Law Prof. Mihailis Diamantis of the University of Iowa said Manafort’s sentence “is symptomatic of a deficiency of how our criminal justice system sentences white-collar criminals generally. Is his sentence light? Yes. As all white-collar sentences tend to be.”