A group that helped thwart the confirmation of Gov. Kathy Hochul’s choice to lead New York’s highest court last year has announced a campaign aimed at pushing elected officials to more closely scrutinize judicial nominees and appointees across the state.
The group, the Center for Community Alternatives, which advocates for criminal justice reform, argued in a letter to Ms. Hochul this month that New York governors, who can nominate and appoint judges to several state courts, and the State Senate, which confirms the nominations, have failed to properly evaluate judges’ records and fitness to serve before placing them on the bench.
The new campaign, The Court New York Deserves, argues that reappointments have become routine, and that “too many people with influence over judicial selection have come to take for granted that once judges are put on the bench, they will serve until they reach the mandatory retirement age.”
In its letter, the group urged Ms. Hochul to “change course from your predecessors and only nominate for reappointment judges who have shown sound judgment, exceptional integrity and commitment to New York’s values.”
A spokesman for the governor, Avi Small, said on Monday that “as she has done since taking office, Governor Hochul will select judicial nominees based on their experience, qualifications and judicial temperament.”
The campaign comes at a time when judges in New York are facing heightened scrutiny, particularly in the debates around bail reform, and a year after the Center for Community Alternatives spearheaded a grass-roots campaign against Ms. Hochul’s pick for chief judge, Justice Hector D. LaSalle, that led to the State Senate’s first-ever rejection of a governor’s nominee for that post.
People are increasingly realizing how important state courts are for protecting certain rights, said Douglas Keith, senior counsel in the Brennan Center for Justice’s Judiciary Program. States have made different attempts at better evaluating their judges, he said, but “I’m not aware of any state that’s doing it well.”
The campaign against Justice LaSalle, who progressive Democrats believed was too conservative and hostile to unions and abortion rights, played a key role in the Senate’s decision, said Senator Michael Gianaris, a Democrat from Queens and the deputy majority leader.
In the past, he said, judicial appointments were treated like “trade bait,” where senators considered a nomination a chance to get something from the governor, which was not “a very sober and serious way of taking constitutional responsibility.”
Now, he said, “The Senate is intent on asserting itself as a coequal branch of government that has a significant role over these appointments.”
Richard Lewis, the president of the New York State Bar Association, said that the association had appointed a task force to conduct an in-depth analysis of the judicial appointment process; he declined to comment further until the task force concludes its work.
The work of outside groups pushing for judicial scrutiny has been met with suspicion by some in Albany.
Senator Luis R. Sepúlveda, a Democrat of the Bronx and a member of the Judiciary Committee, said the advocates seemed not to have a grasp on how to evaluate a judge’s time on the bench. Justice LaSalle was an “excellent candidate,” he said, adding that outside groups had a “larger influence than they should have” in his nomination process.
Mr. Sepúlveda disagreed that nominations had been rubber-stamped by the State Senate in the past.
Recent efforts to shed light on misconduct within the criminal justice system and to create a metric to analyze the work of judges and prosecutors have encountered pushback. But the success in the chief judge fight has emboldened the Center for Community Alternatives to expand its goals.
“Our advocacy around the chief judge vacancy showed us how much New Yorkers benefit when elected officials and the public learn about judges’ records and engage with the judicial selection process,” said Peter Martin, the organization’s director of judicial accountability.
The group’s first target is Justice Vincent Del Giudice, who was first appointed to the Court of Claims in 2002 and has been serving as an acting Supreme Court judge in Brooklyn for over two decades. Justice Del Giudice, who was last confirmed by the Senate in 2015, is approaching the mandatory retirement age of 70, and the group argues that the governor should not reappoint him because he has “a long record of cruelty” and “is not a fit judge.”
Justice Del Giudice’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The group pointed to a report from Scrutinize, a judicial transparency organization, that found that between 2007 and 2023, appeals courts reduced 19 sentences that Justice Del Giudice had imposed because they were excessive. He was also the trial judge in a murder case that was overturned last year, which he had allowed to proceed even after it became clear that the defendant was not the same man identified by a witness in a photo lineup.
Justice Del Giudice also showed “disrespect for his position, and a sense of impunity,” when he vaped through a trial, they said.
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