On Wednesday, a federal appeals court overturned the 14-year prison sentence imposed on Michael Avenatti, a lawyer who has fallen from grace due to his conviction for defrauding his clients. The court has ordered that he be resentenced, indicating that there may be a reevaluation of the terms of his punishment.
Michael Avenatti, who gained widespread recognition for his legal representation of adult film actress Stormy Daniels in her lawsuit against former President Donald Trump, entered a guilty plea in 2022. He admitted to four counts of wire fraud as well as a tax-related offense, all without securing any plea agreement with federal prosecutors.
A three-judge panel from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals determined that the lower trial court, which handed down a sentence of 168 months to Michael Avenatti, made an error in calculating his punishment. The panel argued that the trial judge placed excessive emphasis on a perjury enhancement while not adequately considering the worth of Avenatti’s legal services and the payments he had made to his victims. This miscalculation prompted the appellate court to call for a reassessment of Avenatti’s sentence.
“I am thankful that a UNANIMOUS three judge panel of the 9th Circuit threw out my draconian prison sentence today,” Avenatti wrote on Platform X. “The sentence was always grossly unjust and violative of my most basic constitutional rights, but the government sought it anyway solely because of who I am. We ALL deserve due process.”
The panel also evaluated whether Michael Avenatti’s sentence should be served concurrently with two other sentences he received for separate high-profile convictions. One of these convictions was for aggravated identity theft, stemming from his theft of proceeds from Stormy Daniels’s book, while the other was for his conspiracy to extort money from Nike.
Michael Avenatti received a four-year prison sentence for the case involving Stormy Daniels and an additional 2.5 years for his conspiracy to extort Nike. The determination of whether these sentences will be combined with his new sentence for defrauding other clients will ultimately be made by the trial court.
This year, Avenatti appealed both the Daniels and Nike cases to the Supreme Court, but the justices chose not to review either appeal. Additionally, he has been suspended from practicing law in California since 2020.
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