In February 2003, Jones affirmed the NYPD's decision not to issue permits to organizers of a planned mass march past the United Nations building in protest of the U.S. run-up to the Iraq War. The ruling upheld the NYPD's decision to allow only a "stationary rally" near the United Nations headquarters, a decision that authorized the NYPD to block thousands of demonstrators from making their way in small groups to the 49th Street and 1st Avenue rally on the morning of February 15, 2003. Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York City Civil Liberties Union marked the denial of permit as an unprecedented refusal of the protesters' constitutional right of assembly. In her testimony to the New York City CouncilCommittee on Government Operations, Lieberman noted the instances of police violence and the civil rights violations that took place in the NYPD's enforcement of the denial-of-permit decision upheld by Jones. Jones presided over Edith Windsor's suit against the United States, United States v. Windsor, challenging the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA. Windsor had married her same-sex partner, Thea Spyer, in Canada in 2007, and the couple lived in New York, which recognized same-sex marriages performed in other jurisdictions. When Spyer died in 2009, Windsor owed over $363,000 in federal estate taxes, which she would not have had to pay had her spouse been of the opposite sex. In her lawsuit seeking a refund of the tax payment, Windsor asserted that Section 3 of DOMA, which defines marriage under federal law as solely the union of one man and one woman, violated the constitutional guarantee of equal protection of the laws. Judge Jones agreed and granted summary judgment in favor of Windsor. The United States appealed, and the Second Circuit affirmed Judge Jones's ruling. In a 5–4 decision issued on June 26, 2013, the Supreme Court struck down section 3 of DOMA "as a deprivation of the equal liberty of persons that is protected by the Fifth Amendment." Jones served as arbitrator in the NFL case against former RB Ray Rice. Rice received a 2-game suspension after a domestic violence incident left his then-girlfriend unconscious in the elevator after he struck her. Rice admitted to the NFL that he had struck her and that she had been knocked out. Months later, a video of the incident was released. Commissioner Goodell subsequently suspended Rice indefinitely, stating that the video showed a much more violent incident than Rice had led them to believe. Rice appealed, and won after Mrs. Jones found no evidence that Rice misled the NFL. Jones determined Goodell's indefinite suspension to be "capricious" and "arbitrary" because he was essentially suspending Rice for the same incident twice. Jones's ruling echoed much of the public sentiment to Goodell, as many media outlets hounded Goodell, asking, "did you really need to see the video to know that hitting a woman is violent?" Jones's ruling was only that a player cannot be disciplined for the same incident twice, a rule akin to not allowing double jeopardy in the US criminal system. Jones was appointed on April 26, 2018, to serve as a special master in the Michael Cohen case.
