As Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a 1994 Supreme Court decision, felon is “the worst word that can be applied to any person or thing.” When Donald J. Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts by a jury in a Manhattan courtroom in May, the nation was confronted with a first in history: a felon who had once held the highest office in the land. The question now is whether the label will actually stigmatize Trump, as it has done to so many others over the centuries.
President Biden seems to be betting that this will happen. He has called Trump a “convicted felon” during weeks of campaigning and more recently during the first presidential debate. Biden's “Character Matters” ad calls Trump a “convicted felon who only cares about his own interests” and says a conviction would reveal “the kind of person he is.”
The term “felony” carries with it 900 years of history, a vestige of the harsh punishments and everyday discrimination common in the Middle Ages. But in some ways its power comes from its malleable boundaries: Unlike specific crimes, which depend on the actions of the accused, the category of felony is defined solely by the punishment.
“There's no clear definition,” says Elise Wang, a historian who traces the term's origins back to medieval literature, “just tautology.”
In other words, a felon is someone who has been convicted of a felony, a crime punishable by a prison term of one year or more and, according to the Department of Justice handbook, “the most serious crime.”
Many felonies, like those of Trump and Hunter Biden, amount to lying on official documents. “This is one of those places where there's a gap between the common understanding of the word and the law,” says Alice Ristroff, a professor at Brooklyn Law School. “When we say 'felony,' we generally associate it with violent acts like murder, but in reality, almost anything that is criminal in any way can be charged as a felony.”
An estimated 20 million Americans, or 8% of the adult population, are currently labeled as “felons.” The rate is much higher for black men, with one study estimating 33% have been convicted of a felony.
Many felons are permanently barred from receiving food stamps, qualifying for public housing, holding any form of employment, or voting, even after they have served their sentences — what legal scholars call “collateral consequences.”
When Justice Thomas wrote that felon was “the worst word that can be given to any person or thing,” he was citing an old decision. That decision, in turn, was citing an ancient history of English law. The passage revealed a subtle admiration in the use of “felon.” “Sometimes there may be a touch of admiration in it,” the authors wrote. “For fierceness may be transformed into admirable courage.”
Voters seem to be sensitive to this ambiguity: Although early polls showed that Trump's support dropped slightly among independents after he was convicted, seven times as many Republicans said a conviction would be a “good thing” for his campaign than opposed it.
Rahim Buford, who founded a nonprofit for formerly incarcerated people and was himself convicted of a felony, told The New York Times that the former president may now understand “what it feels like” to be an inmate of the criminal justice system.
“He's been convicted and now he's in our community,” Buford said.
While Trump's legal team is preparing to argue in court that his conviction should be thrown out following the Supreme Court's ruling on presidential immunity, the former president has portrayed himself as the victim of an unjust system and accepted his new criminal status on his own terms. “This is bigger than me,” he said the day after the verdict. “The public gets it.”
This isn't Trump's first time infamy — the subject of a criminal investigation or even the first time he's been summoned to court — but after the jury handed down its verdict, Trump seems to realize that being a felon is something different. It will be a new level of disgrace for him, and for his presidency.
While his lawyers make a final push to fight the ruling in court, Trump is pursuing a second effort: finding a way to turn his new status into a badge of honor. If his efforts to shed the label don't work, he will try to flaunt it instead: turning his 34 felony convictions into voting grounds. for If successful, this would be perhaps Trump's boldest transgression yet.
From Feudalism to Jim Crow Laws
The earliest uses of “felony” are related to betrayal. A 12th-century manuscript of the French epic poem “The Song of Roland” describes felony as “a felon, a deceitful traitor.” A 14th-century religious text denounces Judas, a filthy felon who “waited for Jesus while he betrayed him.”
Wang said the fact that the term “felon” first appeared in literature before moving into the legal world is significant because a felon, a particularly evil person, predates the concept of a felony, a particularly heinous crime.
“The word is a derogatory term for 'bad person,'” she said. “Being bad means being excluded from society. Bad people don't get a happy ending like in the stories. We don't let them back. In the medieval context, it meant death or exile. At that time, most people lived and died in the town where they were born. So if a stranger showed up and said, 'I had to leave where I was,' we wouldn't treat him very well. We would keep him on the fringes of society.”
Initially, felonies were a form of feudal disobedience, a crime committed by serfs or servants who failed to perform their prescribed duties to their lord. Around 1300, they began to appear in English criminal law as the equivalent of a felony. Botleascompensation and Bots — And as a royal offence, it becomes a crime that can lead to the death penalty.
The category began to expand soon after its creation. In the early days of English common law, there were nine types of felonies: murder, assault, manslaughter, rape, arson, robbery, burglary, theft, and sodomy. According to William Blackstone, by 1765, Parliament had designated 160 felonies. Today, there is no definitive count of how many crimes in the United States are designated as felonies under state and federal law. One study puts the total number of types of federal crimes (including misdemeanors) at 5,199.
So-called “felony expansion” has been criticized across the political spectrum. The National Rifle Association has complained about “the federal and state campaign to criminalize everything,” and has pointed out that Martha Stewart's four felony convictions related to insider stock trading mean she can no longer legally own a gun. Lawyers' claims that the average American unknowingly commits three felonies every day have been trumpeted by conservative critics who call executive branch regulators the “administrative state.”
Legal scholars have sharply criticized the U.S. felony system, saying it is essentially an extension of Jim Crow laws and that it strips millions of black people of the right to vote.
“This is about creating a permanent racial underclass,” Wang said. “History shows that some Americans are very happy with that. They might even like it.”
At a 1901 Alabama convention to amend the state constitution, the speaker explicitly linked the disenfranchisement of felons to the goal of “establishing white supremacy” “by law, not by force or fraud,” as Jennifer Taylor of Yale Law School noted.
Regardless of how deliberate felon disenfranchisement was in other parts of the country, statistics suggest it has worked: One study found that more than 5 million Americans were prevented from voting in the 2020 presidential election because of a felony conviction, and Black people were 3.7 times more likely to be affected by disenfranchisement than white people.
Currently, 25 states bar at least some people with felony convictions from voting, including Trump's home state of Florida, but the fact that Trump was convicted in a New York state court means he will probably be allowed to vote in November. Gov. Ron DeSantis has promised to clear the way for him to vote if necessary.
“We love villains.”
Trump has argued that his conviction reflects the legitimacy of the overall legal system rather than his own actions. If this argument sounds familiar, it is because it is: Trump has made it many times before.
Trump's former campaign chairman (Paul Manafort) and longtime adviser and friend (Roger Stone) are both convicted felons — to Trump, “felon” is just a word, at least when it comes to his inner circle, and he has issued presidential pardons to all three.
Trump has repeatedly invoked notorious mob boss Al Capone, comparing his legal woes to those of Manafort and, later, his own. Ignoring the fact that Capone spent eight years in federal prison, Trump has tried to argue that he and his associates received harsher treatment from the government in their criminal cases than Capone did.
In Wang's view, likening Trump to Capone may be another attempt to leverage his beliefs to his advantage by portraying himself as an outlaw, a wrestling-style arch-villain.
“His being outside the system adds more ammunition to his case,” she said. “We love villains. There's something very appealing about them. But I don't think the law should talk about villains. That's for the story, that's for literature.”
Legal experts say anyone seeking to capitalize on the embarrassment that may come with Trump's new felon label should carefully consider the broader implications of a felony conviction.
“It may be strategically wise to keep repeating the message, 'Trump is a felon, Trump is a felon,'” Ristroff said, “but in doing so it reinforces ideas about criminal law and the category of 'felon,' deployed in racist ways that are devastating to other defendants.”
Ristroff advocates for abolishing the felony category altogether. She likens the word to “bastard,” “idiot,” “fool” and “pauper” – four other derogatory terms that have been used to ostracize people in the past, all of which have their origins in the Middle Ages. All of them remained in American law into the 20th century, but have since been largely phased out.
Trump's lawyers told the judge in his Manhattan trial on Monday that Trump's social media posts, phone records and Oval Office conversations are inadmissible evidence under the Supreme Court's new ruling on presidential immunity, and that his conviction should be thrown out. It's a situation that Al Capone would have envied: a potential lifeline being offered to him by the Supreme Court's six justices, half of whom were appointed by Trump himself. For Trump, even the “felon” label, which is meant to scar him forever, may be up for negotiation.
