New York needs more resources to address issues like mental illness and housing to help reduce the number of cases that enter the family court system, which is often tasked to address cases it is not designed to handle, the state’s top judge said on Monday.
The judge, Rowan D. Wilson, who oversees the state’s entire court system, said that the conditions that land families in legal trouble are often complex problems like mental illness, physical illness, violence, poor health and nutrition, inadequate medical care and housing instability. Many of those issues are rooted in poverty, and courts are not equipped to help families navigate them, Judge Wilson said.
“If we had a magic wand we should use it to eliminate Family Court entirely by eliminating all the problems families have,” he said. “But that isn’t possible, because the root causes of the distress that families, parents and children have are not created by the courts, but are fomented elsewhere.”
In his speech at the Court of Appeals in Albany, N.Y., Judge Wilson acknowledged the additional funding that the state legislature and Gov. Kathy Hochul had allocated to family courts in recent years. New funding helped create 29 new Family Court judgeships, hire new magistrates and increase nonjudicial staffing by 21 percent, he said. Judges also receive training on how to weigh trauma when deciding a case, Judge Wilson said.
The state’s preliminary budget that the governor announced last month asked for five new family court mental health parts across the state. For now, Judge Wilson called for more resources for the courts to help families navigate these issues in the short run. But in the long run, he said, the state needs to invest in things like Gov. Hochul’s proposal for universal pre-K to reduce the problems families experience.
Once a family is enmeshed in family court, a 2024 report from the New York State Senate found that they were up against “Kafka-esque” dilemmas with life-changing consequences. The courts and attorneys “have faced unacceptably burdensome caseloads, litigants have faced unnecessary delays, and resources have been unjustifiably withheld,” the report said.
The report also found that many of the cases that go through family courts do not involve allegations of state-defined abuse, and the allegations impact Black and Latino families disproportionately.
“Those problems are not made by Family Court, and cannot best be addressed by Family Court,” Judge Wilson said. “But at present, it falls on Family Court to adapt from treatment of symptoms to treatment of the underlying ills.”
On Monday, Judge Wilson shared the stage with both practitioners in family court and people who have gone through the system.
One woman, Sarai Mejia spoke about how her life was turned upside down after her infant ended up in an emergency room.
After she and her fiancé, who performed CPR on the five-week-old child, took the boy home, he became fussy and impossible to soothe, she said. She took him to the hospital again and learned that his femur had been broken.
“From that moment on, the entire atmosphere changed from assistance to accusation,” Ms. Mejia said. A worker from the agency that oversees child welfare “arrived at the hospital and told me that my son’s previous hospital stay was now considered the result of abuse,” Ms. Mejia said.
Her daughter was removed from her care. She only had limited contact with her hospitalized son until he was discharged, at which point the agency took him, too. It took four months and a lawyer with constant advocacy from a public defender to get her children back, she said. She can never recover the time she spent separated from her children, she said.
“My fiancé had to fight his case for four more months after mine ended,” Ms. Mejia said. “He had to move out of our home, and I had to take care of the kids alone. That was so hard mentally and financially, but we have a strong foundation that no court case can break.”
Hurubie Meko is a Times reporter covering criminal justice in New York, with a focus on the Manhattan district attorney’s office and state courts.
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