U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has been assigned to oversee President-elect Donald Trump’s appeal to the nation’s highest court submitted on Wednesday that seeks to halt a criminal sentencing scheduled for Friday morning in the New York hush money case.
Sotomayor, who was appointed to the Supreme Court in 2009 by then-President Barack Obama, handles emergency appeals from the Second Circuit, which includes New York, Connecticut, and Vermont.
In May 2024, Trump was found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records in the Stormy Daniels hush money case.
Two months after the ruling, however, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Trump v. United States that Trump is immune from federal prosecution for official acts he took while in office.
Despite the Supreme Court’s ruling, the judge in the New York case, Juan Merchan, decided not to dismiss the case against Trump and instead delayed sentencing from November 26 to this Friday.
In a 40-page filing to the Supreme Court on Wednesday, the president-elect’s legal team is seeking an automatic stay of trial-court proceedings to allow Trump’s appeal pointing to presidential immunity to play out in the New York appellate courts and, as the filing notes, “if necessary” in the Supreme Court.
While Merchan has indicated that he does not intend to sentence the president-elect to jail and instead give Trump an “unconditional discharge,” Trump’s legal team argues that the charges are “politically motivated” and have been “ flawed from the very beginning.”
“This Court should enter an immediate stay of further proceedings in the New York trial court to prevent grave injustice and harm to the institution of the Presidency and the operations of the federal government,” Trump’s filing reads.
“In fact, the prospect of imposing sentence on President Trump just before he assumes Office as the 47th President raises the specter of other possible restrictions on liberty, such as travel, reporting requirements, registration, probationary requirements, and others—all of which would be constitutionally intolerable under the doctrine of Presidential immunity. Indeed, every adjudication of a felony conviction results in significant collateral consequences for the defendant, regardless of whether a term of imprisonment is imposed,” the filing adds.
Sotomayor directed prosecutors to respond to the president-elect’s request by Thursday at 10 a.m.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
