The garage judges of New York

The New York Times has a great article about New York State's town and village courts:

Some of the courtrooms are not even courtrooms: tiny offices or basement rooms without a judge’s bench or jury box. Sometimes the public is not admitted, witnesses are not sworn to tell the truth, and there is no word-for-word record of the proceedings.

Nearly three-quarters of the judges are not lawyers, and many — truck drivers, sewer workers or laborers — have scant grasp of the most basic legal principles. Some never got through high school, and at least one went no further than grade school.

But serious things happen in these little rooms all over New York State. People have been sent to jail without a guilty plea or a trial, or tossed from their homes without a proper proceeding. In violation of the law, defendants have been refused lawyers, or sentenced to weeks in jail because they cannot pay a fine. Frightened women have been denied protection from abuse.

These are New York’s town and village courts, or justice courts, as the 1,250 of them are widely known. In the public imagination, they are quaint holdovers from a bygone era, handling nothing weightier than traffic tickets and small claims. They get a roll of the eyes from lawyers who amuse one another with tales of incompetent small-town justices.

A woman in Malone, N.Y., was not amused. A mother of four, she went to court in that North Country village seeking an order of protection against her husband, who the police said had choked her, kicked her in the stomach and threatened to kill her. The justice, Donald R. Roberts, a former state trooper with a high school diploma, not only refused, according to state officials, but later told the court clerk, “Every woman needs a good pounding every now and then.”

A black soldier charged in a bar fight near Fort Drum became alarmed when his accuser described him in court as “that colored man.” But the village justice, Charles A. Pennington, a boat hauler and a high school graduate, denied his objections and later convicted him. “You know,” the justice said, “I could understand if he would have called you a Negro, or he had called you a nigger.”

And several people in the small town of Dannemora were intimidated by their longtime justice, Thomas R. Buckley, a phone-company repairman who cursed at defendants and jailed them without bail or a trial, state disciplinary officials found. Feuding with a neighbor over her dog’s running loose, he threatened to jail her and ordered the dog killed.

“I just follow my own common sense,” Mr. Buckley, in an interview, said of his 13 years on the bench. “And the hell with the law.”

It's as if you gave Bill O'Reilly his own courtroom in a closet in upstate New York. Nancy Grace would love this guy:

In 2003 alone, justices disciplined by the state included one in Montgomery County who had closed his court to the public and let prosecutors run the proceedings during 20 years in office.

Check this one out:

In the Catskills, Stanley Yusko routinely jailed people awaiting trial for longer than the law allows — in one case for 64 days because he thought the defendant had information about vandalism at the justice’s own home, said state officials, who removed him as Coxsackie village justice in 1995. Mr. Yusko was not even supposed to be a justice; he had actually failed the true-or-false test.

Wow...

A 17-year-old girl had stayed out all night, then fought with her family and wound up facing a harassment charge in court in Alexandria Bay, a busy tourist village on the St. Lawrence River. The justice, Charles A. Pennington, a boat hauler with 23 years on the bench, took her not-guilty plea on a Sunday in 2003.

But when told that the girl had no place to go, the judge did not send her to a women’s shelter or alert social service officials, as local justices typically do. He took her home.

Talk about activist judges:

And then there are the powers they simply take.

In what the Commission on Judicial Conduct called “a shocking abuse of judicial power,” Justice Roger C. Maclaughlin single-handedly went after a man he decided was violating local codes on the keeping of livestock in Steuben, near Utica. The justice interviewed witnesses, tipped off the code-enforcement officer, lobbied the town board to deny the man approval to run a trailer park, then jailed him for 10 days without bail — or even a chance to defend himself, the commission said.

Read the whole thing, it's a truly startling piece of investigative journalism.

[Via This Modern World.]

Comments

[T. Bailey]

I checked the calendar, and it's not April 1st, and the source isn't The Onion, so I'm assuming this is a true story. Nice to see that the US is, once again, totally justified in taking the high ground when condemning backward nations. Yes, champions of the Rule of Law, they are. I suppose this is a cost-saving measure -- perhaps the BC government should look into it, as obsessed as they are with the bottom line. Clearly the quality of justice in NY state hasn't suffered -- it's better than just licensing lynch mobs, for example.

Seriously, this is fucked up.

[whig]

Trackback: It's not just New York

[1984 Was Not a Shopping List]

I always love reprints of news stories from prior years like this. You should post the date of the original printing, though--I'm assuming, say, 1827? Thank God those days are gone, eh?

[Philip Brooks]

Ack. This reminds me of the villages HP Lovecraft described in his horror tales of the rural northeast. Of course, he described corrupt, backwater sorcerors, but corrupt, backwater judges are all the worse for being real.

[1984 Was Not a Shopping List]

"The Bumfuck Horror"

[soonermick]

Throw in some political machine cronyism and this sounds exactly like the Justice of the Peace system in Texas. The biggest problem with these inferior (in every sense of the word) courts is that when their decisions are appealed, it is usually de novo, so no substantive review is given to the actual decisions or process granted in the first instance. Rights without remedies.

[brad]

Wow.
This makes me glad I never got caught doing anything serious when I wandered out of the "safe-haven" of Albany suburbs as a kid. Do these justices have the authority to issue bench warrants?
How does this even work? Is it just for little po-dunk towns in upstate and western counties with no tax bases? I can't imagine that I actually grew up under such a system without knowing. My parents would have warned me.

[brad]

I suppose I should have read the article before asking all those questions. I never realized justices of the peace did anything more than give people a way to get married without involving a church. That part of their portfolio should be maintained, at least.