NEW YORK (AP) — Federal appeals court judges questioned during oral arguments Thursday whether a roughly four-year prison term given to Sean “Diddy” Combs for the hip-hop mogul 's conviction on prostitution-related charges was too harsh.
The three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan did not immediately rule after hearing two hours of arguments.
At the conclusion, Circuit Judge William J. Nardini called it an “exceptionally difficult case” that raises questions of first impression “not only for this court but for any federal court in the country.”
Throughout the arguments, judges questioned whether a judge improperly considered elements of acquitted charges to sentence Combs to what his lawyer, Alexandra Shapiro, said was the most prison time ever given someone convicted of the same charges with a similar criminal history.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Christy Slavik, arguing for the government, challenged Shapiro's claim, saying the four-year, two-month prison term given to Combs was below what federal sentencing guidelines called for and was in line with similar convictions in the 2nd Circuit.
Combs, currently in federal prison in New Jersey, is challenging his conviction and prison sentence. He was convicted last July under the federal Mann Act, which bans transporting people across state lines for any sexual crime.
But he was acquitted of sex trafficking and racketeering charges that carried the potential for a life sentence.
In sentencing Combs, Judge Arun Subramanian said: “Mr. Combs, you’re being sentenced for the offenses of conviction, NOT the crimes he was acquitted of. However, under law, the court ‘shall consider’ the nature of the offense and characteristics of the defendant.”
The judge also cited law which states that no limitation shall be placed on the “background, character and conduct” that a judge can consider.
During Thursday's arguments, Shapiro asked the appeals panel for a speedy decision.
Combs, 56, has been behind bars since his September 2024 arrest. The Federal Bureau of Prisons says he is scheduled for release in April 2028.
His attorneys say Combs' conviction should be reversed, or he should at least be freed and resentenced to less time.
Despite extensive written arguments on the subject, there was no discussion Thursday about claims by Combs' lawyers that his conviction should be reversed on grounds that the First Amendment protects sexual encounters between his girlfriends and male sex workers because they were sometimes filmed and amounted to “amateur pornography.”
There was extensive discussion, though, about his lawyers' arguments that Subramanian wrongly considered evidence of fraud and coercion that they said the jury rejected as it exonerated him on the most serious charges.
Combs' trial last year exposed the sordid private life of one of the most influential figures in music. The case featured harrowing testimony about violence, drugs and sexual performances that witnesses said he called “freak-offs” or “hotel nights.”
He did not testify. His defense team acknowledged that he could be violent but argued that prosecutors were straining to make a federal crime out of his personal life.
FILE - Music mogul and entrepreneur Sean "Diddy" Combs arrives at the Billboard Music Awards in Las Vegas, May 15, 2022. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File)
LONDON (AP) — A 300-million-year-old tentacled sea creature has lost its crown as the world’s oldest octopus, after scientists found evidence that it’s not an octopus at all.
Newly published research concludes that fossilized remains listed by Guinness World Records as the earliest known octopus belong instead to a relative of a nautilus, a cephalopod with both tentacles and a shell.
University of Reading zoologist Thomas Clements, the lead researcher behind the new findings, said the fossil, Pohlsepia mazonensis, has long been the subject of scientific debate.
“It’s a very difficult fossil to interpret,” he said. “To look at it, it kind of just looks like a white mush.
“If you look at it and you are a cephalopod researcher and you’re interested in everything octopus, it does superficially look a lot like a deep-water octopus.”
The creature, a blob about the size of a human hand, was found in the Mazon Creek area of Illinois, about 50 miles southwest of Chicago, that is rich in fossils from a period before dinosaurs walked the Earth.
Its identification by paleontologists as an octopus in 2000 upended ideas about the evolution of the eight-tentacled cephalopods, suggesting they emerged much earlier than previously thought. The next oldest-known octopus fossil is only about 90 million years old.
“It’s a huge gap,” Clements said. “And so that big gap got researchers sort of questioning, ‘Is this thing actually an octopus?”
To solve the mystery of the “weird blob,” Clements and his team used a synchrotron — which uses fast-moving electrons to create beams of light brighter than the sun — to look inside the fossil rock. They found a ribbon of teeth known as a radula that is common to all mollusks, including nautiluses and octopuses. Each row had 11 teeth. Octopuses have either seven or nine.
“This has too many teeth, so it can’t be an octopus,” Clements said. “And that’s how we realize that the world’s oldest octopus is actually a fossil nautilus, not an octopus.”
The teeth matched those of a fossil nautiloid called Paleocadmus pohli that had been found in the same area. Clements said the mistaken identification may have happened because the creature decomposed and lost its telltale shell before it was fossilized, complicating identification.
As a result of the findings published this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Guinness World Records said it will no longer list Pohlsepia mazonensis as the earliest known octopus.
Managing Editor Adam Millward said the scientists had made “a fascinating discovery.”
“We will be resting the original ‘oldest octopus fossil’ title and look forward to reviewing this new evidence,” he said.
Pohlsepia mazonensis is named for its discoverer James Pohl, and is in the collection of the Field Museum in Chicago.
Paul Mayer, manager of the museum's collection of fossil invertebrates, said he was “a little surprised” by its new classification as a nautiloid, but noted that "people have been questioning whether it was an octopus ever since the original paper was first published in 2000.”
He said new technologies for scientific investigation had brought renewed interest in the Mazon Creek fossils.
“(That) is great for our collections and hopefully new discoveries will be made and new stories will be revealed,” Mayer said.
Clements said the museum should not be disappointed by the new evidence, which means it now has “the oldest soft tissue nautilus in the world.
“The Field Museum have a small collection of these ancient nautiluses, which I think as a cephalopod worker is probably the best thing ever,” he said.
FILE -Field Museum and Chicago's skyline is seen from Soldier Field prior to an NFL preseason football game between the Chicago Bears and the Tennessee Titans, Aug. 12, 2023, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Kamil Krzaczynski, File)
