Justice presides one last time on a local bench
Karen Peters reflects on career as mandatory retirement nears
Karen Peters, a former Ulster County Family Court judge, is retiring from the Appellate Division of state Supreme Court.
Justice Karen Peters never envisioned a life of the bench.
In fact, she laughed, it wasn’t until she was involved with a protest group in Washington D.C. — and her friends decided she was the smartest one of the group and should go to law so she could get them out of jail — that she even considered the legal profession.
“I never thought I’d be a lawyer, that was not the plan for me,” she said.
But the seed planted by her friends at that protest look root, and Peters — with a scholarship to New York University Law School — put herself on a trajectory that ultimately would lead her to become the first woman to be presiding justice of the Appellate Division of the state Supreme Court’s Third Judicial Department.
On Friday, Peters sat in the ceremonial courtroom in the Ulster County Courthouse and presided over a five-member panel of judges hearing appeals in cases that ranged from a dispute over an easement for an access road on a property in Lake George to suppression of evidence in a criminal case and a malpractice case involving an area pediatrician.
It was only the second time in the 121 years that the Appellate Division, Third Department, had been hearing cases that it held a session in Ulster County. The first was in 1998.
It also was the last time that Peters, who began her career in the judiciary in 1983, when she was elected an Ulster County Family Court judge, will take the bench in an Ulster County courtroom.
Peters, who turned 70 earlier this year, will step down in December, having reached the mandatory retirement age for presiding justices in New York.
In 1992, Peters became the first woman elected to the state Supreme Court.
In 1994, she was appointed to the Appellate Division, Third Department, by then-Gov. Mario Cuomo, and in 2012, she was ap-
pointed presiding justice of the court by Cuomo’s son, Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
When she retires in December after 24 years serving in the Third Department, she will hold the distinction of being the second-longest serving justice in the department.
Local attorneys, other members of the judiciary in Ulster County, family, friends, spectators and even a group of high school students from the Bruderhof filled the courtroom gallery Friday for the chance not only to witness the proceedings but to pay tribute to the local woman who made history.
“We are gathered here at the Ulster County Courthouse ... because we are paying tribute to and celebrating the career of an amazing, talented, hardworking and inspirational jurist,” Justice Elizabeth Garry said at the start of the proceedings.
Describing Peters as a woman of “determination,” and as having a “strength of purpose,” Garry said Peters has shown herself to be a person of character and who was dedicated to the law and to the people she served.
Peters said that when she ran for Family Court judge, she quoted Thomas Paine, who said, “A long habit of not
thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right,” and promised that she would change the voters’ belief that a Family Court judge had to be a man.
It was a promise she kept and as she moved through the state court system has worked to ensure diversity among the judiciary “so people have faith in the rule of law.”
She recalled, too, how after being elected to the state Supreme Court, she worked with her son, Avanti, who was in the courtroom on Friday, to teach him the Pledge of Allegiance while bathing
him at night so he could recite it at her swearing-in ceremony.
“I wondered if he would be able to say the pledge fully clothed,” she joked.
“Its been a wonderful trip,” Peters said. “Thank you all for being here with me.”
With a final “So let’s do justice,” Peters asked that the first case be called, and for the next roughly two hours, attorneys appeared before the court in rapid-fire succession — each attorney was given only 10 minutes in which to make their arguments — being peppered, at times, by justices who questioned, challenged and event joked with them.
When the last case had been heard, Peters and the other justices took a few minutes to meet with the group of students, then she left the courtroom where she had been sworn in so many years before, for the last time as a judge.