Judicial vacancy

With all due respect for the protracted medical plight of Acting Manhattan State Supreme Court Justice Daniel McCullough: Please skeddadle now, your honor, from a bench ice-cold for having been abandoned for nearly three years. At stake is not only the $193,000 taxpayer-funded salary McCullough has collected throughout his absence, though that’s not nothing.

McCullough’s protracted paid leave from his assignment hearing criminal cases also leaves an outrageously short-handed court system that much shorter of hands, further imperiling New Yorkers’ already tattered constitutional right to a speedy trial.

Felony cases remain backlogged by the hundreds, and most defendants end up taking plea deals rather than endure endless waits for endless trials.

Meanwhile, as the Daily News reports, McCullough apparently lives in a Long Island nursing home. After decades as a correction and probation officer and then a government attorney, his long career of service the people of New York now clearly come to a close.

He could have retired on a generous pension $50,000 less than his current salary — and now has no excuse not to. However, his judicial superiors cannot force him to retire.

If McCullough refuses, the state Commission on Judicial Conduct must make the decision for him, and bring some justice to the justice system.