A New York appellate court on Tuesday declined to halt President-elect Donald J. Trump’s criminal sentencing, damping his hopes of shutting down the case before returning to the White House.
Mr. Trump, who is scheduled to face sentencing on Friday, 10 days before being sworn in for a second presidential term, had asked the state appeals court to intervene and freeze the proceeding. His lawyers, who are now likely to file a last-minute appeal in federal court, had argued that Mr. Trump was entitled to full immunity from prosecution, and even sentencing, now that he was the president-elect.
The emergency application went to a single appellate court judge, Ellen Gesmer, who held a brief hearing on Tuesday before denying Mr. Trump’s request 30 minutes later.
At the hearing, Justice Gesmer appeared highly skeptical of Mr. Trump’s arguments, grilling his lawyer about whether he had “any support for a notion that presidential immunity extends to president-elects?”
The lawyer, Todd Blanche, conceded that he did not, saying: “There has never been a case like this before.”
Ever since a New York jury in May found Mr. Trump guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal — making him the first former president to be convicted of a crime — he has sought to unravel the verdict or at least postpone the sentencing.
For now, Justice Gesmer’s decision has narrowed Mr. Trump’s path to victory, enhancing the chances he will face the embarrassing spectacle of a criminal sentencing. The sentencing would formalize, in the eyes of the law, Mr. Trump’s status as a felon, making him the first president to hold that dubious designation.
It might otherwise be a largely symbolic proceeding. The trial judge overseeing the case, Juan M. Merchan, signaled last week that he would spare Mr. Trump jail time or any other substantive punishment.
The potential leniency appeared to resonate with Justice Gesmer, who highlighted it during the hearing and questioned Mr. Blanche about why she shouldn’t “treat that seriously.”
Mr. Blanche, who has been tapped by Mr. Trump to become the deputy attorney general in his administration, did not respond to questions from reporters as he left the courthouse. A spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which prosecuted Mr. Trump, declined to comment on Justice Gesmer’s ruling.
Ultimately, Justice Gesmer might not have the final word. Mr. Trump can now race to federal court in hopes of staving off the proceeding, and if that fails he can ask the Supreme Court to intervene.
He might start with a New York federal appeals court, which is already weighing his request to move the case out of state court, though some legal experts were skeptical that would succeed.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if he attempts to get a federal court to intervene at this point, but that’s really a Hail Mary,” said Mark Zauderer, a New York litigator who specializes in appeals.
Mr. Trump’s effort to attack his conviction in state court will continue as well.
His lawyers this week filed an action in the state appeals court against Justice Merchan that challenged his recent decisions to uphold Mr. Trump’s conviction. That action, which could take weeks or months to resolve, coincided with Mr. Trump’s more urgent request for an emergency stay of the sentencing.
The one-two punch marked an aggressive escalation of Mr. Trump’s favorite legal strategy: delay.
After being indicted four times in four jurisdictions, Mr. Trump leaned heavily on that strategy, making a variety of appeals and other filings to run out the clock until Election Day.
When he won the election in November, it paid off: The federal special counsel who had brought two of those cases — one in Washington, D.C., and the other in Florida — shut them down, thanks to a Justice Department policy prohibiting prosecutions of sitting presidents. And in Georgia, where Mr. Trump is accused of trying to overturn the state’s 2020 election results, an appeals court disqualified the local prosecutor who brought the case, delaying it indefinitely.
In New York, Justice Merchan delayed the sentencing numerous times. He first postponed it in July to weigh Mr. Trump’s effort to have the case thrown out based on a recent Supreme Court decision granting presidents broad immunity for their official actions. The judge punted again in the fall to accommodate the presidential campaign, and after the election, Justice Merchan paused the sentencing once more to consider the president-elect’s argument that his electoral victory should nullify the case.
On Tuesday, Justice Gesmer noted these delays and attributed the purported time crunch — with the sentencing coming so close to the inauguration — to Mr. Trump’s many legal maneuvers.
“Justice Merchan would have been happy to hold this sentencing back in July,” Justice Gesmer said.
In recent weeks, Justice Merchan began to lay the groundwork for a last-minute sentencing as he picked apart Mr. Trump’s arguments for throwing out the conviction.
On Dec. 16, the judge denied Mr. Trump’s request to dismiss the case in light of the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling. While the high court granted former presidents broad immunity for official actions taken in office, the New York case concerned a personal and political crisis that predated Mr. Trump’s presidency: a hush-money payment to a porn star during Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign. (Mr. Trump, the jury concluded, orchestrated a plan to falsify records that covered up the arrangement.)
And last week, Justice Merchan rejected Mr. Trump’s claim that his election victory should shut down the case altogether, concluding that overturning the jury’s verdict would “undermine the rule of law in immeasurable ways.”
Mr. Trump is now formally challenging those decisions with the appeals court, filing a so-called Article 78 petition against Justice Merchan. It is unclear when the court might take up Mr. Trump’s petition — a special proceeding used to fight decisions made by New York State agencies and judges — but it most likely won’t happen until after Mr. Trump takes office.
At the hearing on Tuesday, Steven Wu, a lawyer with the district attorney’s office, argued that Mr. Trump’s claim of immunity was “baseless” and that the charges concerned “unofficial conduct” that had taken place before his presidency. Mr. Wu also contended that Justice Merchan had “bent over backward to accommodate all of the defendant’s concerns,” noting that he was allowing Mr. Trump to appear for the sentencing virtually and that he won’t impose a jail sentence.
Before the election, Mr. Trump was facing up to four years in prison, though legal experts predicted that he would spend no more than a few weeks or months behind bars.
In the ruling last week, Justice Merchan suggested that he would impose an unconditional discharge of Mr. Trump’s sentence, a rare and lenient alternative to jail or probation. Unlike a conditional discharge, which allows defendants to avoid punishment if they pay restitution or hold down a job, an unconditional discharge would come without any requirements at all.
That sentence, Justice Merchan wrote in an 18-page decision, “appears to be the most viable solution to ensure finality.”
