Attorneys for hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs urged a federal appeals court docket in New York late Tuesday to order his quick launch from jail and reverse his conviction on prostitution-related fees or direct his trial choose to lighten his four-year sentence.
The legal professionals stated in a submitting with the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court docket of Appeals in Manhattan that Combs was handled harshly at sentencing by a federal choose who let proof surrounding fees he was acquitted of unjustly affect the punishment.
Combs, 56, incarcerated at a federal jail in New Jersey and scheduled for launch in Could 2028, was acquitted of racketeering conspiracy and intercourse trafficking at a trial that resulted in July. Combs was convicted below the Mann Act, which bans transporting folks throughout state traces for any sexual crime.
Attorneys for Combs stated Decide Arun Subramanian acted like a “thirteenth juror” in October when he sentenced Combs to 4 years and two months in jail. They stated he erred by letting proof surrounding the acquitted fees affect the sentence he imposed.
They famous that Combs was convicted of two lesser counts, prostitution offenses that didn’t require pressure, fraud, or coercion. They requested the appeals court docket, which has not but heard oral arguments, to acquit Combs, order his quick launch from jail or direct Subramanian to scale back his sentence.
“Defendants sometimes get sentenced to lower than 15 months for these offenses — even when coercion, which the jury didn’t discover right here, is concerned,” the legal professionals wrote.
“The choose defied the jury’s verdict and located Combs ‘coerced,’ ‘exploited,’ and ‘pressured’ his girlfriends to have intercourse and led a felony conspiracy. These judicial findings trumped the decision and led to the best sentence ever imposed for any remotely comparable defendant,” the legal professionals wrote.
At sentencing, Subramanian stated that when calculating the jail time period, he thought of Combs’ therapy of two former girlfriends who testified that the Unhealthy Boy Information founder beat them and coerced them into having intercourse with male intercourse employees whereas he watched and filmed the encounters, typically masturbating.
On the trial, former girlfriend Casandra “Cassie” Ventura testified that Combs ordered her to have “disgusting” intercourse with strangers lots of of occasions throughout their decade-long relationship that resulted in 2018. Jurors noticed video of him dragging and beating her in a Los Angeles resort hallway after one such multiday “freak-off.”
The second former girlfriend, who testified below the pseudonym “Jane,” stated she was pressured into intercourse with male employees throughout what Combs referred to as “resort nights,” drug-fueled sexual encounters from 2021 to 2024 that additionally may final days.
At sentencing, Subramanian stated he “rejects the protection’s try to characterize what occurred right here as merely intimate, consensual experiences, or only a intercourse, medicine, and rock ‘n’ roll story.”
He added: “You abused the ability and management that you just had over the lives of girls you professed to like dearly. You abused them bodily, emotionally, and psychologically. And also you used that abuse to get your method, particularly when it got here to freak-offs and resort nights.”
