NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump’s sentencing in his hush money case has been postponed until after the November election, granting the former president a hard-won reprieve as he navigates the homestretch of his current campaign and the aftermath of his criminal conviction.

In a decision Friday, Manhattan Judge Juan M. Merchan delayed Trump’s sentencing until Nov. 26, three weeks after the final votes are cast in the U.S. presidential election. The sentencing had been scheduled for Sept. 18, about seven weeks before Election Day.

The delay is the latest bit of good fortune for Trump in an election season that has been laden with legal perils for him.

The new date means voters will choose their next president without knowing whether the Republican nominee is going to jail, nor whether he will even be sentenced at all. Merchan now plans to rule Nov. 12 on Trump’s request to overturn the verdict and toss out the case because of the U.S. Supreme Court’s July presidential immunity ruling.

Merchan explained that he was postponing the sentencing “to avoid any appearance — however unwarranted — that the proceeding has been affected by or seeks to affect the approaching presidential election in which the Defendant is a candidate.”

“The Court is a fair, impartial and apolitical institution,” he added, writing that his decision “should dispel any suggestion” otherwise.

Trump — fresh from watching appellate arguments in a sexual abuse lawsuit against him in a nearby federal court — heralded the hush money sentencing delay. In a post on his Truth Social platform, he called the case a “witch hunt” and a “political attack” and reiterated that he’d done nothing wrong.

“This case should be rightfully terminated, as we prepare for the Most Important Election in the History of our Country,” he wrote.

Prosecutors said they stood ready for sentencing on the new date.

“A jury of 12 New Yorkers swiftly and unanimously convicted Donald Trump of 34 felony counts,” said Danielle Filson, a spokesperson for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. He is a Democrat.

Trump’s lawyers pushed for the delay on multiple fronts, petitioning the judge and asking a federal court to intervene. They argued that punishing the former president in the thick of his campaign to retake the White House would amount to election interference.

Prosecutors didn’t take a position on Trump’s delay request, deferring to Merchan.

A federal judge on Tuesday rejected Trump’s request to have the U.S. District Court in Manhattan seize the case from Merchan’s state court. Trump is appealing the federal court decision and has asked appeals judges to halt postconviction proceedings.

Trump entered this election year facing the possibility of multiple criminal trials after he was indicted four times since March 2023. But a string of decisions in the last two months, culminating with Friday’s sentencing delay, has largely cleared his legal calendar. The hush money case is the only one to have gone to trial.

In July, a judge dismissed a federal case in Florida charging Trump with illegally hoarding classified documents. The Supreme Court’s immunity decision has ensured significant delays in a separate federal case in Washington, D.C., in which Trump’s accused of trying to overturn his 2020 election loss. A Georgia election case also remains idled.

The immunity ruling reins in prosecutions of ex-presidents for official acts and restricts prosecutors in pointing to official acts as evidence that a president’s unofficial actions were illegal.

Election Day is Nov. 5, but many states allow voters to cast ballots early, with some set to start the process just a few days before or after Sept. 18.

Trump is the first ex-president convicted of a crime. A jury in May found him guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal a $130,000 hush money payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 presidential election. Daniels claims she and Trump had a sexual encounter a decade earlier after they met at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe.

Prosecutors cast the payout as part of a Trump-driven effort to keep voters from hearing salacious stories about him during his first presidential campaign. Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen paid Daniels and was later reimbursed by Trump, whose company logged the reimbursements as legal expenses.

Trump maintains that the stories were false and that the reimbursements were for legal work and logged correctly. He has pledged to appeal the verdict, but that cannot happen until he is sentenced.

Democrats backing their party’s presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, have made his conviction a focus of their messaging.

In speeches at the party’s convention in Chicago last month, President Joe Biden called Trump a “convicted felon” running against a former prosecutor. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, labeled Trump a “career criminal, with 34 felonies, two impeachments and one porn star to prove it.”

Trump’s 2016 Democratic opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, inspired chants of “lock him up” from the convention crowd when she quipped that Trump “fell asleep at his own trial, and when he woke up, he made his own kind of history: the first person to run for president with 34 felony convictions.”

Falsifying business records is punishable by up to four years behind bars. Other potential sentences include probation, a fine or a conditional discharge, which would require Trump to stay out of trouble to avoid additional punishment.

Trump’s case “stands alone, in a unique place in this Nation’s history,” Merchan wrote.

The public’s confidence “in the integrity of our judicial system demands a sentencing hearing that is entirely focused on the verdict of the jury and the weighing of aggravating and mitigating factors free from distraction or distortion,” he wrote.

___

Associated Press writers Michelle L. Price in New York and Eric Tucker in Washington contributed reporting.