New York prosecutors on Thursday urged the U.S. Supreme Court to deny President-elect Donald J. Trump’s last-ditch effort to halt his criminal sentencing, in a prelude to a much-anticipated ruling that will determine whether he enters the White House as a felon.

In a filing a day before the scheduled sentencing, prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney’s office called Mr. Trump’s emergency application to the Supreme Court premature, saying that he had not yet exhausted his appeals in state court. They noted that the judge overseeing the case plans to spare Mr. Trump jail time, which they argued undermined any need for a stay.

The prosecutors, who had secured Mr. Trump’s conviction last year on charges that he falsified records to cover up a sex scandal that endangered his 2016 presidential campaign, implored the Supreme Court to let Mr. Trump’s sentencing proceed.

“There is a compelling public interest in proceeding to sentencing,” they wrote, and added that “the sanctity of a jury verdict and the deference that must be accorded to it are bedrock principles in our Nation’s jurisprudence.”

The district attorney’s office has so far prevailed in New York’s appellate courts, but Mr. Trump’s fate now rests in the hands of a friendlier audience: a Supreme Court with a 6-to-3 conservative majority that includes three justices Mr. Trump appointed. Five are needed to grant a stay.

Their decision, coming little more than a week before the inauguration, will test the influence Mr. Trump wields over a court that has previously appeared sympathetic to his legal troubles.

In July, the court granted former presidents broad immunity for official acts, stymying a federal criminal case against Mr. Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 election. (After Mr. Trump won the 2024 election, prosecutors shut down that case.)

The revelation that Mr. Trump spoke this week by phone with one of the conservative justices, Samuel A. Alito Jr., has fueled concerns that he has undue sway over the court.

Justice Alito said he was delivering a job reference for a former law clerk whom Mr. Trump was considering for a government position. But the disclosure alarmed ethics groups and raised questions about why a president-elect would personally handle such a routine reference check.

It is unclear whether Justice Alito will recuse himself from the decision, which the court could issue promptly.

Mr. Trump’s sentencing is scheduled to begin at 9:30 a.m. Friday in the same Lower Manhattan courtroom where his trial took place last spring, when the jury convicted him on all 34 felony counts.

If the Supreme Court rescues Mr. Trump on Thursday, returning him to the White House on Jan. 20 without the finality of being sentenced, it will confirm to many Americans that he is above the law. Almost any other defendant would have been sentenced by now.

“A sentencing hearing more than seven months after a guilty verdict is aberrational in New York criminal prosecutions for its delay, not its haste,” the prosecutors wrote.

The prosecutors also noted that Mr. Trump would most likely avoid any punishment at sentencing. The trial judge, Juan M. Merchan, has signaled he plans to show Mr. Trump leniency, reflecting the practical impossibility of incarcerating a president.

Still, Mr. Trump’s lawyers argued that the sentencing could impinge on his presidential duties. It would formalize Mr. Trump’s conviction, cementing his status as the first felon to occupy the Oval Office.

That status, Mr. Trump’s lawyers wrote in the filing to the Supreme Court, would raise “the specter of other possible restrictions on liberty, such as travel, reporting requirements, registration, probationary requirements and others.”

The court’s immunity ruling also underpinned Mr. Trump’s request to halt his sentencing. In the application, Mr. Trump’s lawyers argued that he was entitled to full immunity from prosecution — as well as sentencing — because he won the election.

“This court should enter an immediate stay of further proceedings in the New York trial court,” the application said, “to prevent grave injustice and harm to the institution of the presidency and the operations of the federal government.”

Mr. Trump’s application was filed by two of his picks for top jobs in the Justice Department: Todd Blanche, Mr. Trump’s choice for deputy attorney general, and D. John Sauer, his selection for solicitor general.

“Forcing President Trump to prepare for a criminal sentencing in a felony case while he is preparing to lead the free world as president of the United States in less than two weeks imposes an intolerable, unconstitutional burden on him that undermines these vital national interests,” they wrote.

Whether that argument will prevail is uncertain. Some legal experts have doubted the merits of Mr. Trump’s application, and lower courts have greeted his arguments with skepticism.

Earlier Thursday, a judge on the New York Court of Appeals in Albany, the state’s highest court, declined to grant a separate request from Mr. Trump to freeze the sentencing.

Prosecutors noted that Mr. Trump had yet to have a full appellate panel rule on the matter, and that he had not mounted a formal appeal of his conviction. Consequently, they argued, the Supreme Court “lacks jurisdiction over this non-final state criminal proceeding.”

Also this week, a judge on the First Department of New York’s Appellate Divison in Manhattan rejected the same request to halt the sentencing.

That judge, Ellen Gesmer, grilled Mr. Trump’s lawyer at a hearing about whether he had found “any support for a notion that presidential immunity extends to president-elects?”

With no example to offer, Mr. Blanche conceded, “There has never been a case like this before.”

In their filing Thursday, prosecutors echoed Justice Gesmer’s concerns, noting that “This extraordinary immunity claim is unsupported by any decision from any court.”

They also argued that Mr. Trump’s claims of presidential immunity fell short because their case concerned a personal crisis that predated his first presidential term. The evidence, they said, centered on “unofficial conduct having no connection to any presidential function.”

The state’s case centered on a sex scandal involving the porn star Stormy Daniels, who threatened to go public about an encounter with Mr. Trump, a salacious story that could have derailed his 2016 campaign.

To bury the story, Mr. Trump’s fixer, Michael D. Cohen, negotiated a $130,000 hush-money deal with Ms. Daniels.

Mr. Trump eventually repaid him. But Mr. Cohen, who was the star witness during the trial, said that Mr. Trump orchestrated a scheme to falsify records and hide the true purpose of the reimbursement.

Although Mr. Trump initially faced sentencing in July, his lawyers buried Justice Merchan in a flurry of filings that prompted one delay after another. Last week, Justice Merchan put a stop to the delays and scheduled the sentencing for Friday.

Mr. Trump faced four years in prison, but his election victory ensured that time behind bars was not a viable option. Instead, Justice Merchan indicated that he would impose a so-called unconditional discharge, a rare and lenient alternative to jail or probation.

“The trial court has taken extraordinary steps to minimize any burdens on defendant,” the prosecutors wrote Thursday.

Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today, on a national day of mourning for former President Jimmy Carter, we’ll look at Carter’s relationship to New York. We’ll also get details on the decision by the city’s Board of Elections not to fire its executive director after investigators found that he had harassed two female employees.

President Jimmy Carter flew to New York in October 1977 to tell the United Nations General Assembly that he was “willing” to shrink the United States’ nuclear arsenal if the Soviet Union matched the reductions. The next day, he did something unannounced, unexpected and unrelated to foreign policy.

He went to the South Bronx.

It was a symbolic side trip to show that he was willing to face urban problems. Leaders like Vernon Jordan of the National Urban League had already begun to talk about dashed expectations: “We expected Carter to be working as hard to meet the needs of the poor as he did to get our votes,” Jordan had said a couple of months earlier. “But so far, we have been disappointed.”

Carter, a Democrat, wasn’t satisfied with driving through neighborhoods dominated by desolation and despair. “Let me walk about a block,” he told the Secret Service agents accompanying him, and he got out of the limousine.

That morning in the South Bronx became an enduring memory of his presidency. But there are other New York memories to remember today, a national day of mourning for Carter, who died on Dec. 29.

There was the high of his nomination in 1976, at the first national political convention held in Manhattan since the Roaring Twenties.

There was also the not-so-high of his nomination in the same place four years later, when haplessness seemed to reign: The teleprompter malfunctioned during his acceptance speech. He flubbed a line about former Vice President Hubert Horatio Humphrey, calling him “Hubert Horatio Hornblower.” The balloons didn’t tumble from the ceiling when they were supposed to. And his long feud with Senator Edward Kennedy simmered on.

Another New York memory now seems as improbable as Carter’s candidacy had once been: a high-kicking photo op with the Radio City Rockettes in 1973. Carter, then a Georgia governor who had taught Sunday school, hammed it up with dancers who showed a lot of leg. (The governor, joining the kick line in his crisp suit, did not.)

Carter was an ambitious Navy lieutenant turned peanut farmer turned politician, and he understood what New York could do for him. The Carter biographer Jonathan Alter wrote that the publicity stunt with the Rockettes helped bring him name recognition, as did a full-page ad in Variety that showed him in a director’s chair. The ad, and that trip to New York, promoted a push to lure filmmaking to Georgia.

By the time Carter went to the South Bronx, 10 months into his presidency, New York was struggling to pull out of its “Ford to City: Drop Dead” abyss. But whatever hope Carter seemed to bring soon faded: A week later, during a World Series game at Yankee Stadium, the sportscaster Howard Cosell supposedly said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning.”

“Somehow that sentence entered the language, though he never said that, or exactly that,” Ian Frazier explained in his book “Paradise Bronx.” “In any case, it’s what people remember.”

People yelled “Give us money!” and “We want jobs!” as Carter went by. On one ruined block, “he stood looking around, his expression blank and dazed,” Frazier wrote. “For a president to allow himself to be seen when he appears so overwhelmed required self-sacrifice and moral fortitude.”

With him was Mayor Abraham Beame, a lame duck — but not Representative Ed Koch, who had defeated Beame in the Democratic primary and would be elected mayor in November. The president and the mayor-in-waiting were feuding over Middle East policy.

Back at his hotel, Carter called it “a very sobering trip.” And as Frazier noted, the drive-by made America look at “this place that most had been looking away from.”

Politicians stopped looking away: The stretch of Charlotte Street that he visited became a stop on campaign after campaign. “Reagan went there in 1980 to try to show up Carter,” Alter said. But the policy Carter pushed for in response to the poverty he saw — changes that effectively forced banks to provide home loans in low-income neighborhoods — worked, Alter said. “It just took a while.”

A few years later, there were more than 100 suburban-style houses in the neighborhood Carter walked through. Today the houses are worth roughly $750,000 apiece, according to the real estate website Trulia.

“He cared about people — he wanted to help people,” Alter said. “Jimmy Carter was a rural Georgian, but he had a lot of empathy for New Yorkers who needed a break.”

Weather

Today will be mostly sunny and breezy with a high near 34 degrees. Tonight, expect a mostly clear sky, strong winds and a low near 26.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until Jan. 20 (Martin Luther King’s Birthday).

The latest New York news

The New York City Board of Elections — which is responsible for registering voters, repairing voting machines and tallying ballots — refused to dismiss its top official after he harassed two female employees, according to a report released by the city’s Department of Investigation.

Investigators found that the board’s executive director, Michael Ryan, had “created a hostile work environment for these two employees” in violation of the board’s own policies. The investigation department added that those policies had “serious deficiencies” that limited the board’s ability “to effectively prevent and address workplace misconduct and harassment.”

The board released a statement defending its decision not to fire Ryan, who was suspended for three weeks without pay and ordered to attend sensitivity training. The board’s statement quoted Ryan as apologizing for his actions.

“While I dispute these allegations and disagree with the report’s conclusion,” he said, “I accept the determination of the commissioners” to suspend him as being “in the best interest of the agency.”

According to the report from the investigation department, Ryan made a series of sexual comments to one female employee over several months, some of which were accompanied by physical gestures such as puckering his lips at her or touching her face with his hand.

He also engaged in a conversation with Michael Corbett, the board’s administrative manager, in the presence of the woman about what the best age gap might be in a heterosexual relationship. The two men determined that the age difference between her and Ryan would not be a problem, investigators said.

Investigators said that Ryan’s conduct had caused the woman “significant anxiety and emotional distress,” which figured in her decision to leave her job.

Investigators also found that Ryan had made “ethnicity- and gender-based comments toward” a second female employee, including some that trafficked in racial stereotypes.

Corbett was also suspended for one week, placed on probation for one year and ordered to attend sensitivity training.

Rodney Pepe-Souvenir, the president of the board of commissioners that oversees the agency, and Frederic Umane, its secretary, said in the statement released on Wednesday that they believed the penalties Ryan was given “sent a strong message that these types of unwelcomed and insensitive comments will not be tolerated by anyone” at the Board of Elections.

METROPOLITAN diary

In the bag

Dear Diary:

I was waiting in line to pick up a prescription at a crowded Duane Reade. An older woman who was clearly exhausted left the line to sit down in a nearby chair.

When it was her turn to get her prescription, she stood up, left her belongings on the chair and went to the counter.

While waiting for the pharmacist, she turned and looked at the man who was sitting next to where she had been.

“You know what’s in that bag?” she asked, motioning toward her stuff.

The man shook his head.

“My husband,” she said. “He died last week, and I have his remains in there.”

— Brad Rothschild

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.

Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.

P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.

Carole Wilbourn, a self-described cat therapist, who was known for her skill in decoding the emotional life of cats, as confounding as that would seem to be, died on Dec. 23 at her home in Manhattan. She was 84.

Her death was confirmed by her sister Gail Mutrux.

Ms. Wilbourn’s patients shredded sofas, toilet paper and romantic partners. They soiled rugs and beds. They galloped over their sleeping humans in the wee hours. They hissed at babies, dogs and other cats. They chewed electrical wires. They sulked in closets, and went on hunger strikes.

They suffered from childhood trauma, low self-esteem, anxiety, depression, jealousy and just plain rage. And Ms. Wilbourn, who was self-taught — in college she had studied (human) psychology and majored in education — seemed particularly attuned to the inner workings of their furry minds. A minor Manhattan celebrity, she was often called the kitty Freud, or the mother of cat psychiatry.

Cats hate change, she often noted. Even a new slipcover on the sofa can undo them. Cats are selfish. Unlike dogs, who strive to please their master, a cat strives to please itself. To mangle a cliché, happy cat, happy (human) life.

“A cat behaves badly when it’s trying to communicate,” she told The Los Angeles Daily News in 1990. “It’s sending an SOS. It’s saying, ‘Please help me.’”

Ms. Wilbourn developed her specialty over a half-century after founding The Cat Practice, billed as Manhattan’s first cats-only hospital, in 1973 with Paul Rowan, a veterinarian. She said she was the first feline therapist in the country, a claim that is not known to have been disputed.

She was the author of six books, including “Cats on the Couch” (first published in 1982), which offered case studies to help cat lovers better understand their furry friends. She treated patients as far away as Australia and Turkey (by phone), and made house calls as far away as Maui.

“Cats have emotions,” she said. “They get happy and sad and frustrated, and, since I understand emotions in people, I understand them in cats.”

She estimated that she had treated some 13,000 cats, and claimed a success rate of 75 to 80 percent. Take Snoopy, who didn’t like to be held and played rough when he was, and ran around in circles if he was over-excited. Sobriety, a 3-year-old tabby, scratched her own skin raw. Minina bit all visitors, and had to be locked away during dinner parties. Ms. Wilbourn’s diagnosis? Single cat syndrome. The treatment? Another cat, preferably a kitten; lots of attention, but not to the kitten; and, in Sobriety’s case, Valium.

She once treated a cat with Reiki energy healing after it had accidentally been run through the dryer.

Ms. Wilbourn’s go-to prescriptions also included New Age and classical music, recordings of whale songs and an abundance of treats, like catnip (a natural antidepressant, she pointed out). She also suggested canny behavior modifications by the humans, like having a new romantic partner feed the cat. She often recommended, in the days of landlines and answering machines, that humans call their pets and leave them cheerful messages. Her services did not come cheap. House-visits in Manhattan hovered at $400.

“If I lived anywhere besides a big city like New York,” she told The New York Times in 2004, “I’d be on food stamps.”

Carole Cecile Engel was born on March 19, 1940, in the Flushing section of Queens, one of four children of Harriet (Greenwald) and Gustave Engel, a taxi driver. There were no cats in their Queens apartment, but the family did have a canary named Petey. Carole graduated from Bayside High School and attended Albany State University’s School of Education before transferring to New York University, where she studied psychology and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in business education in 1964.

Her first cat was a part-Siamese named Oliver, whom she adopted through an ad in The Village Voice. She was working as a substitute teacher and a Playboy bunny before opening The Cat Practice with Dr. Rowan, whom she later married.

“She was very attuned to the animals, to their emotional states,” Dr. Rowan said in an interview. “It was very unusual for the time.” As a result, their business flourished.

An earlier marriage to David Wilbourn, a photographer, ended in divorce, as did her marriage to Dr. Rowan. In addition to Ms. Mutrux, her sister, she is survived by Orion 2, a Siamese.

Ms. Wilbourn was a dog lover too, and on occasion treated canines, though she never had a dog herself. But she had definite views about anti-cat people. In her experience, she said, some of those who claimed they were allergic to cats often just didn’t like them.

“A cat is a free spirit and will not be subservient,” she wrote in “The Inner Cat” (1978). “People who derive their gratification from giving commands that others must obey can be threatened by a cat. It’s hard to assert your sense of power over a cat.”