A New York appellate court on Tuesday declined to halt President-elect Donald J. Trump’s criminal sentencing, setting back 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 appeals court to intervene and freeze the proceeding. His lawyers argued that Mr. Trump was entitled to full immunity from prosecution, and even sentencing, now that he was the president-elect.
The emergency application fell 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 Mr. Trump’s 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.”
And when Mr. Blanche argued that Justice Gesmer’s decision hinged on the immunity of a sitting president, she cut him off with a correction, noting that Mr. Trump was currently the president-elect.
Yet Justice Gesmer might not have the final word. Mr. Trump can now race to federal court in hopes of staving off the sentencing, and if that fails he can ask the Supreme Court to intervene.
For now, though, Justice Gesmer’s decision narrowed Mr. Trump’s path to victory, enhancing the chances he will face the embarrassing spectacle of a criminal sentencing.
The proceeding, should it happen, will be largely symbolic. 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 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.
Mr. Trump’s effort to attack the district attorney’s case will not stop with the failed emergency request.
His lawyers this week filed an action in the 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 legal strategy as he hopes to avoid a public sentencing. Ever since a New York jury convicted him in May on 34 felony counts of falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal, Mr. Trump has attacked the verdict on various fronts, including demanding that Justice Merchan throw out the case and postpone the sentencing.
The approach reflects one of Mr. Trump’s favorite legal tools: 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, the strategy 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.
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