Give it up, Goodman

Former Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Emily Jane Goodman was a scofflaw while she served on the bench: She abused the official parking placard that came with her job by leaving her Audi on the street overnight without fear of getting ticketed. While regulations clearly stated that judges may use such placards only for official business, Goodman would pull up to a metered space near her upper West Side apartment, put the permit on her dashboard and happily leave the vehicle.

It was all very sweet and convenient until these quarters caught Goodman in April, and her bosses at the Office of Court Administration laid down the law to her.

Fast forward to January of this year. Goodman, who had been unhappy that judges had long been denied raises, appeared in a newspaper story announcing that she would step down from the bench to join a newly formed law firm.

That raised a question: Would court adminis- trators issue a 2012 placard to Goodman, along with all the rest of the judges, on Feb. 1? The answer was yes, because Goodman would remain a judge until March 3.

The arrival of that date raised a new question: Had the retired Goodman surrendered the placard for which she had no conceivable official use as a private citizen? The answer was, uh, no.

The judicial hierarchy then wrote to Goodman asking for the card’s return.

She responded in a handwritten letter that all the materials in her chamber had been packed into boxes and that the card was somewhere in the pile and not readily accessible.

Subsequently, in an interview Friday, Goodman said that after we editorialized about her last spring, she removed the placard from the car, put it in her office and assumes that court staffers stuffed it into one of 75 cartons. She will not be using it, she promises. She really, really promises.

We’ll see.