President-elect Donald J. Trump’s latest attempt to stave off his criminal sentencing in New York was denied on Monday, teeing up a frenzied series of last-minute appeals as his inauguration draws near.
The denial came from the trial judge overseeing the case, Juan M. Merchan, who scheduled the sentencing for Friday, 10 days before Mr. Trump is scheduled to be sworn in for a second presidential term.
Although Mr. Trump’s lawyers had implored the judge to postpone the sentencing, Justice Merchan dismissed their claims as “a repetition of the arguments he has raised numerous times in the past.”
Mr. Trump is now poised to escalate his effort, court filings show, turning to a New York appeals court in hopes that it will intervene in his case.
Late Monday, Mr. Trump’s lawyers filed a civil proceeding against Justice Merchan before the appeals court, challenging two of the judge’s recent decisions to uphold Mr. Trump’s conviction. Mr. Trump’s lawyers will argue to the appeals court that Mr. Trump is immune from criminal prosecution now that he is the president-elect.
The flurry of filings demonstrates the great lengths to which Mr. Trump will go to avoid his sentencing.
Even though Justice Merchan has signaled that he will spare the former and future president jail time or any other substantive punishment, Mr. Trump is scrambling to avoid the symbolic blow of a sentencing. Once he is sentenced for the 34-count conviction, he will formally become a felon.
Mr. Trump could also ask the appeals court to freeze the sentencing as soon as Monday night or early Tuesday.
That emergency request would be in the hands of a single appellate judge, who could rule as soon as Tuesday, deciding either to grant or deny an interim stay. While ordinarily that judge’s ruling would only be temporary — a full panel of appellate judges is supposed to evaluate Mr. Trump’s claims in the coming weeks — the case against the president-elect is running out of time.
Once Mr. Trump is sworn in on Jan. 20, the proceedings might grind to a halt, potentially making any additional rulings moot. Under a longstanding Justice Department policy, sitting presidents cannot face federal prosecution, and although the New York case was brought in state court, not federal, it will most likely follow that precedent.
While it is unclear whether the appeals court might pause the sentencing, Mr. Trump’s challenge of the judge’s recent rulings could be doomed, legal experts said. In New York, criminal defendants typically cannot appeal rulings of this type until they have been sentenced.
Mr. Trump filed the challenge as a so-called Article 78 petition, a special proceeding used to fight decisions made by New York State agencies and judges. In essence, the president-elect is bringing a civil action against the judge to unwind two of his most significant rulings.
In the first ruling, delivered last month, the judge rejected Mr. Trump’s argument that a recent Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity had nullified his conviction for falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal. Justice Merchan followed up that ruling with an even bigger blow to Mr. Trump last week, denying his effort to overturn the case in light of his election win and ordering him to appear for sentencing.
In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Trump declared that his legal team was moving “to stop the unlawful sentencing in the Manhattan D.A.’s witch hunt.” The spokesman, Steven Cheung, added that “the Supreme Court’s historic decision on immunity, the state Constitution of New York, and other established legal precedent mandate that this meritless hoax be immediately dismissed.”
The outreach to the appellate court came after Mr. Trump’s lawyers failed to persuade Justice Merchan to postpone the sentencing.
In a filing to Justice Merchan unsealed on Monday, Mr. Trump’s lawyers argued that Mr. Trump’s sentencing would become a distraction from his presidential duties.
“This court’s decision to schedule a sentencing hearing on Jan. 10, 2025, at the apex of presidential transition and 10 days before President Trump assumes office, necessitates that President Trump will be forced to continue to defend his criminal case while he is in office,” wrote his lawyers, Todd Blanche and Emil Bove.
But the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, disputed that argument and opposed Mr. Trump’s bid to cancel the hearing. The prosecutors urged Justice Merchan to deny Mr. Trump’s request, citing “the strong public interest in prompt prosecution and the finality of criminal proceedings — interests that are particularly salient here in light of the jury’s guilty verdict.”
Mr. Trump’s legal team asked the judge to pause the sentencing by 2 p.m. on Monday so that if Justice Merchan declined to do so, Mr. Trump still had time to “seek an emergency appellate review,” an unusually insolent request to make of a judge.
Around 5 p.m., Justice Merchan denied Mr. Trump’s bid, though he noted that his decision did not “in any way preclude Defendant from pursuing any, and all other forms of relief.”
Attacking judges, particularly Justice Merchan, is a key page from Mr. Trump’s legal playbook. And so is delay.
Mr. Trump, after being indicted four times in four jurisdictions, used a mixture of appeals and court filings to manufacture one delay after another in each of the cases. The effort, while scattershot, effectively ran out the clock.
The federal special counsel who brought two of those cases — one in Washington, D.C., and the other in Florida — recently shut them down, bowing to a Justice Department policy prohibiting federal prosecutions of sitting presidents. And in Georgia, where Mr. Trump is accused of trying to subvert 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 had already postponed the sentencing several times. He initially delayed it to consider Mr. Trump’s effort to have the conviction thrown out based on the recent Supreme Court decision granting presidents broad immunity for their official actions. The judge, who rejected that effort in a Dec. 16 ruling, also postponed the sentencing to accommodate Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign.
In the wake of his electoral victory, Mr. Trump again asked the judge to dismiss the case, arguing that a president-elect could not face prosecution.
Last week, Justice Merchan denied that bid as well — and tried to put a stop to the delays. He wrote in an 18-page ruling that throwing out the jury’s verdict “would undermine the rule of law in immeasurable ways” and that “the sanctity of a jury verdict” was “a bedrock principle in our nation’s jurisprudence.”
The judge’s ruling infuriated Mr. Trump. In a series of posts on social media, he slammed Justice Merchan, a moderate Democrat and a former prosecutor, and claimed that the judge was a “radical partisan.”
And yet, in that same ruling, Justice Merchan disclosed that he planned to spare Mr. Trump any jail time. Instead, the judge signaled that he favored a so-called unconditional discharge of Mr. Trump’s sentence, a rare and lenient alternative to jail or probation.
That sentence, the judge wrote, “appears to be the most viable solution,” nodding to the legal and practical impossibility of jailing a sitting president.
Some legal experts suggested Mr. Trump might not fight the sentencing now that his freedom was no longer at stake; once sentenced, he is free to appeal his conviction.
But ever since his conviction in May, Mr. Trump has insisted that he should not face sentencing. He has also tried to move the case to federal court, where an appeals court is still considering his request.
If the New York appeals court denies his request for an emergency stay, Mr. Trump has other options at his disposal, including asking the federal appeals court to intervene. He could also file a flurry of new litigation in federal court in hopes of rushing to the Supreme Court.
It is unclear whether the Supreme Court would get involved in the case.
The high court intervened in one of Mr. Trump’s federal criminal cases, issuing its landmark ruling granting presidents broad immunity for their official actions. But the New York case involves a personal and political crisis that predated Mr. Trump’s presidency, centering on a hush-money payment to a porn star during Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s fixer at the time, struck the deal with the porn star, Stormy Daniels, in the final days of the 2016 campaign, when she was threatening to go public with her account of a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump, the jury concluded, then covered up his reimbursement of Mr. Cohen through payments falsely classified as ordinary legal expenses.
Matthew Haag contributed reporting.
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