Juan Merchan: Who is the New York Supreme Court judge presiding over Trump’s legal case?
Donald Trump made history on 30 March 2023 when he became the first current or former president to ever be indicted on criminal charges in the history of the US.
A Manhattan grand jury voted to indict Mr Trump on criminal charges over hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels days before the 2016 presidential election.
Manhattan prosecutors have been investigating whether Mr Trump falsified the Trump Organization’s business records when his former lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen made a payment of $130,0000 to Ms Daniels.
Prosecutors claim that the money was used to silence Ms Daniels about an alleged affair she had with Mr Trump, as well as other alleged schemes to suppress negative s tories.
Mr Trump has long denied having an affair with the adult film star.
Mr Trump’s former fixer and personal attorney Cohen was convicted of tax evasion, lying to Congress and campaign finance violations related to the payments to Ms Daniels. He was sentenced to three years in prison.
Now, the former president has also been charged over his role in the payments, appearing before Judge Juan Merchan in Manhattan Criminal Court on Tuesday 4 April to plead not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records.
So who is the judge who is expected to preside over this unprecedented case?
What we know about Judge Merchan
Judge Merchan is currently an acting justice with the New York State Supreme Court – a position he has occupied since 2009.
The Colombia native moved to the US as a child and grew up in Queens, New York City.
He studied at Baruch College and then Hofstra University School of Law before beginning his legal career as a Manhattan assistant district attorney in 1994.
After this, he worked in the State Attorney General’s office and was then appointed to the Bronx Family Court bench in 2006 – before joining the state’s highest court three years later.
This isn’t the judge’s first time overseeing a case involving Mr Trump.
Judge Merchan presided over both the tax fraud trial of the Trump Organization and the trial of the organisation’s longtime CFO Allen Weisselberg last year.
In November, Weisselberg was sentenced to five months in prison and five years post-release supervision after pleading guilty to tax fraud charges.
At his sentencing, Judge Merchan slammed Weisselberg for his “offensive” greed and said that he would have handed down a harsher sentence if he hadn’t made an agreement as part of a plea.
“Had I not made the promise, I would be imposing a sentence much greater than that,” he said.
In the Trump Organization’s trial, the judge hit the company with the highest possible fine at its sentencing in January of this year.
Two subsidiaries of the Trump Organization – Trump Corp. and Trump Payroll Corp. — were convicted on 17 counts, including conspiracy, criminal tax fraud and falsifying business records, for running a 15-year tax fraud scheme.
Prosecutors had asked the judge to hand down the highest possible fines under the law.
Judge Merchan agreed, fining the entities $1.6m in total.
Besides these cases with ties to Mr Trump, the judge has also dealt with other high-profile cases.
In 2012, the judge presided over the case known as the “Soccer mom madam” where Anna Gristina pleaded guilty to charges of running a Manhattan girl ring for millionaires.
