Sean Combs returned to federal court Today, this time through his attorneys, as a three-judge panel at the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan heard arguments over whether his 50-month prison sentence was excessive and legally flawed. Combs, who has been serving his sentence at the Fort Dix Federal Correctional Institution in New Jersey since his conviction last July, did not attend the hearing.
The panel did not issue a ruling after two hours of arguments. Circuit Judge William J. Nardini described it at the close of proceedings as an exceptionally difficult case raising questions no federal court in the country has previously been asked to answer.
What Combs’s legal team argued in court
Defense attorney Alexandra Shapiro led the oral arguments on Combs’s behalf, telling the panel that the sentence handed down by U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian last October represented the harshest punishment ever given to someone convicted of the same charges with a comparable criminal history. She asked the panel for a speedy decision and pushed for either an immediate release, a full reversal of the conviction, or at minimum a resentencing to a shorter term.
The core legal argument centers on what attorneys call acquitted conduct sentencing, a practice that allows judges to factor in behavior tied to charges a defendant was found not guilty of when calculating punishment. Combs was convicted last July on two counts of transporting individuals across state lines to engage in prostitution under the Mann Act, a federal law. He was acquitted of the more serious charges of sex trafficking and racketeering, which carried the potential for a life sentence.
His legal team argued that Subramanian should not have considered evidence of fraud, coercion, and Combs’s role as an organizer of criminal activity in determining the sentence, because the jury had already rejected those findings. The defense maintained that the 50-month term was roughly four times longer than typical sentences for similar Mann Act convictions, even in cases involving coercion.
In separate court filings, his attorneys also argued that the recordings Combs made of sexual encounters involving his former girlfriends and male sex workers constituted a form of expressive conduct protected under the First Amendment, though that argument did not come up during Thursday’s oral arguments.
How prosecutors responded to the appeal
Assistant U.S. Attorney Christy Slavik pushed back on the defense’s characterization of the sentence as outlying. She argued before the panel that the 50-month term actually fell below what federal sentencing guidelines recommended and was consistent with comparable convictions in the Second Circuit. Slavik also defended Subramanian’s decision to consider Combs’s broader conduct, arguing it remained legally relevant to the prostitution counts even after the jury’s acquittals on the more serious charges.
In written filings, prosecutors described the sentencing as appropriate given the nature of how Combs carried out the offenses, arguing that the court was not required to ignore the full context of his behavior simply because the jury declined to convict on the higher charges.
What the original sentencing established
Subramanian sentenced Combs in Manhattan federal court last October to 50 months in prison, a $500,000 fine, and five years of supervised release following his release. At the time, the judge stated that a substantial sentence was necessary to signal that exploitation and violence against women carry real legal consequences. He rejected the defense’s framing of the conduct as consensual and intimate, describing the record as one of sustained physical, emotional, and psychological abuse carried out through a pattern of control over women Combs professed to care about.
Combs has been incarcerated since his arrest in September 2024. His projected release date has shifted in recent months and currently stands at April 15, 2028, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The appeals court has three options available to it: uphold the conviction and sentence as issued, order a new sentencing hearing, or overturn the conviction entirely.
