After being sentenced to four years and two months in prison in October, Sean “Diddy” Combs calls for immediate release in his final appeal plea.
Combs’ lawyers on Tuesday asked the New York federal appeals court to shorten or lessen the more than four-year sentence the rapper received following his conviction on prostitution-related charges.
“Sean Combs is an extremely successful self-made businessman, artist, and philanthropist, and one of the most accomplished Black men in this country. In September 2024, the government charged him with heinous crimes and arrested and detained him,” reads the filing obtained by TheWrap and submitted to the 2nd U.S. Court of Appeals in Manhattan. “He was a trafficker who coerced and defrauded two longtime girlfriends into having sex against their will and who ran a large criminal organization. None of this was true.”
The lawyers went on to argue that because a New York jury found Combs not guilty of racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking charges, the punishment he received was unusually harsh compared to typical sentences for prostitution-related charges that did not involve force or coercion.
“The jury found Combs guilty of two lesser counts: prostitution offenses that did not require force, fraud or coercion. Defendants are typically sentenced to less than 15 months in prison for these offenses, even when coercion, which the jury did not find here, is involved,” the attorneys argued. “But Combs received a sentence more than three times as long, despite the acquittals.”
“He is in prison today, serving a 50-month sentence, because the district judge acted as the thirteenth juror,” Combs’ defense continued. “The judge defied the jury’s verdict and concluded that Combs ‘coerced,’ ‘exploited,’ and ‘forced’ his girlfriends to have sex and led a criminal conspiracy. These legal findings overshadowed the verdict and led to the highest sentence ever imposed on a similar defendant — even though most of the others, unlike Combs, ran prostitution businesses that exploited poor or undocumented women or minors.”
Judge Arun Subramanian handed down the sentence in early October after the disgraced music mogul was found guilty in July. At the time, Judge Subramanian said he wasn’t entirely convinced Combs wouldn’t repeat the crimes, but that he hoped the rapper would “make the most of (his) second chance.”
“You had the power and the resources to continue, and that’s because you weren’t caught,” Judge Subramanian told the rapper. “You paid for and organized these acts. You were not John. You were responsible for them, even if your currency was sexual desire and not money.”
