Disorder in the court
Roughly a third of the people who dispense justice in New York’s judiciary are non-lawyers presiding over town and village courts. Most of them are public servants who comport themselves with civility and propriety. But the state Commission on Judicial Conduct, the system’s watchdog entity, regularly uncovers bad apples who engage in behavior — boorish, unethical, sexist, racist or all of the above — that’s corrosive to the reputation of the judiciary and the smooth operation of local courts.
Just from the past few months, consider the cases of William H. Futrell, a Town Court justice in Cayuga County whose Facebook postings included Nazi imagery and “likes” on images of scantily clad women; June Shepardson, who held both a Town and Village Court role in Cayuga County, and resigned while under investigation for allegedly taking more than $6,000 in court funds (she pleaded guilty to grand larceny last month); Edward Mercer, a town justice in Greene County, who gave his own security company a no-bid $3,300 contract for a camera system, then falsified the invoice; and Randy Hall, a Town Court justice in Broome County, who engaged in workplace behavior and online postings better suited to a teen sex comedy, tried to use his judicial role during a dispute at a gas station, and made remarks to defendants that sent the clear message he had prejudged their cases.
All four non-lawyers were recommended for removal by the Judicial Conduct commission. As noted before in this space, that panel performs its duties with a doggedness that outdoes the legislative and executive branches (though that might be seen as damning with faint praise). The only problem: During the investigative process and the back-and-forth of resolving these matters, the commission is a black box that leaves the public in the dark as to whether a jurist is in deep or merely shallow trouble. (Only the Court of Appeals can remove a judge, though the judiciary can take the stopgap action of taking away a judge’s cases in response to a credible complaint.) Legislation passed by the state Senate but so far ignored by the Assembly would make the commission’s findings public as soon as formal charges are filed. In many of the cases listed above, that change would have brought these matters to public light a year earlier.
And while the numbers ebb and flow every year, roughly two-thirds of the commission’s disciplinary determinations involve nonlawyer judges. Over the disciplinary panel’s 45-year history, more than twothirds of its dispositions involved town and village courts — the only venues where non-lawyer judges can serve.
This accounting is intended in no way to suggest that judges who are lawyers aren’t capable of despicable behavior; the commission’s archives include plenty of those cases, as well. (No less a legal personage that former Chief Judge Janet Difiore retired while under investigation by the commission.) But there does appear to be an opportunity for non-lawyer judges to benefit from additional training, mentoring or monitoring that might reduce these types of antics. As farcical as some of the behavior listed above might sound, the application of justice is no joke, and it shouldn’t be handled by clowns.