With jury deliberations expected to begin Wednesday in Donald Trump's New York criminal trial, the possibility of the former president being sentenced to serve jail time has become a focus of Democrats and the mainstream media.
If Trump is found guilty, Judge Juan Merchan will decide sentencing.
Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, charges which are punishable by up to four years in prison. He has denied all wrongdoing and pleaded not guilty.
Considering the charges are among New York's mildest felonies, and Trump, if found guilty, would be a first-time offender, Politico reported "conventional wisdom holds that even if he's convicted, he's unlikely to do prison time."
Author and attorney Norm Eisen, in a column for The New York Times, said he analyzed nearly 10,000 cases of felony falsifying business records that have been prosecuted across the state of New York since 2015.
"My analysis of the most recent data indicates that approximately one in 10 cases in which the most serious charge at arraignment is falsifying business records in the first degree and in which the court ultimately imposes a sentence, results in a term of imprisonment," Eisen wrote.
One in 10, but the possibility exists.
CBS News, citing a New York corrections source, reported the Secret Service has met with local jail officials to discuss what would happen if Trump is sentenced to prison.
Merchan, after ruling May 6 that Trump violated his gag order, has said, the "last thing I want to do is put you in jail," but "at the end of the day, I have a job to do."
Merchan said he considered jail time "truly the last resort" for many reasons, including the disruption to the trial, political implications of jailing a leading presidential candidate ahead of an election and the extraordinary security challenges of incarcerating an ex-president with a lifetime Secret Service detail.
Later that week, Trump said he would be "very proud" to go to jail for violating Merchan's gag order.
"If anything is mentioned against certain people, and you know who they are, certain people, anything's even mentioned, he wants to put me in jail," Trump said Friday after court wrapped for the day, according to The Hill.
"And that could happen one day. And I'd be very proud to go to jail for our Constitution. Because what he's doing is so unconstitutional."
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this story.