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Spend a little time watching daytime television, and you will see them: Joe Brown, Larry Joe Doherty, Greg Mathis, Mablean, Marilyn Milian. Judge Wapner’s time has passed. Judge Judy’s seems to be continuing, though come fall, she will have at least one new competitor in Judge Christina.
In real life, New York City has the Civil Court. Have a rent dispute with your landlord, and this is where you go. Fight with a client over a fee, and it’s off to Civil Court. Fail to pay your credit cards or other bills for less than $25,000, and 111 Centre Street is in your future.
“Unlike Supreme Court or Surrogate Court, everybody has a story to tell you, and many times they want to stop and tell me about it,” said Mary Rosado. She is a guardianship attorney currently enmeshed in the often bizarre, always confusing process of running for a vacancy on Manhattan Civil Court.
Jury Still Out on Regulations For City’s Judicial Candidates
New York City has 120 Civil Court judges. Manhattan has 17 elected borough-wide and another 36 elected from 10 districts, which often swerve across avenues and leapfrog around neighborhoods. New candidates are systematically rerouted towards vacancies to avoid pressuring incumbents. Local leaders traditionally replace retired judges with people of the same race and gender.
Judicial candidates have to face all the usual difficulties of running for office: standing on street corners in the summer heat, trying to get herds of rushing New Yorkers to pay attention to them and their outstretched hands.
But these contenders also must comply with the intricate ordinances barring them from stating positions on the issues and from having any involvement with the fundraising process, either in soliciting funds or in knowing who contributes.
These are meant to preserve judicial impartiality for the judges Manhattan voters elect to county Supreme Court, Surrogate Court and Civil Court.
Theoretically, this circumvents any concerns that elected judges will enter court proceedings with preconceived notions or inclinations towards claimants who lined their campaign coffers.
Understanding the logic behind these regulations can be easier than adhering to them.
Margaret Chan, who is running for a currently vacant seat in the Second District, which covers a piece of downtown Manhattan, explained that all it takes is one look at her résumé or campaign literature to realize what kind of candidate she is.
“I’m pro-choice, but I can’t walk around saying I’m pro-choice. But if you look at the brochure and see what types of groups I’m a member of, you would know,” she said. “It’s like saying it without saying it.”
Andrea Masley, one of Chan’s opponents, would not discuss any specific issues, but stood by all the experiences on her curriculum vitae.
“Some of that work has been advocacy,” she said. “I’m not going to run away from the work that I’ve done. That’s who I am, that’s why I’m qualified.”
The fundraising regulations can be just as difficult to put into practice.
Though some candidates, like Lori Sattler in the East Side’s Ninth District, can essentially ensure their elections without raising any money, candidates in more competitive elections aim to amass campaign treasuries of up to $200,000. Even though they can attend fundraising events, they are not even supposed to be in the room when their supporters solicit money.
“There are other people in charge of my fundraising and I don’t have anything to do with it,” said Masley.
“Except for my mom. I’m allowed to talk with her, I guess.”
This is difficult for the staffs as well, as Chan’s campaign manager, Michael Oliva, explained.
“Margaret can be standing in the room and in earshot of me and she’s got to pretend she doesn’t know I’m raising money,” he said. “It’s just kind of silly.”
Even if the judicial candidates are not immediately aware of their donors, they can easily look at the public disclosure reports available to anyone over the internet.
Chan explained that the onus was on the candidates—and eventually, on those elected to the bench—to “pretty much” follow the honor system and not look at this information.
But, she admitted, it does not take a computer to seek out this information.
“I’m not even supposed to know who gave money to me,” Chan said.
“But if I see them at the fundraiser, well guess what? I can figure out who contributed.”
The people who run do not have to be residents of their districts. They do not have to be members of the party which elects them. Other than having to be admitted to the bar for 10 years before taking the bench, they do not have to have any judicial experience. Those elected serve 10 year terms, earning $125,600 per year.
All, in theory, are sworn into the same job.
In practice, the Civil Court is the bench’s bench, its judges often used to plug the gaps elsewhere in the judiciary, rotated into spots in the Family, Criminal and Supreme courts, even when the jurisdictions of these posts end many miles from the districts which elected them, though voters have no say in this redistribution.
Since the Democratic Party has such a tight grip on power in the city, any court hopeful must first go through a screening panel, or a consortium of community and legal groups assembled by local Democratic district leaders.
Because it is illegal for judicial candidates or judges to take public stances on issues, panel members must base their decisions on experience and temperament to
determine whom they think is “most highly qualified” to be judge.
Critics complain that panels can be warped by political interests, but defenders, like West Side State Sen. Eric Schneiderman, call them proper and necessary.
“Judicial elections are a somewhat murky process, because it’s really hard for voters to immerse themselves in the issues of what makes a good judge and what
makes a poor judge,” he said. “That’s why people rely on screening panels.”
Panel finalists must then collect 1,500 ballot petition signatures and woo political clubs and elected officials to back them.
Those that do not collect enough signatures are generally forced out of the race. Those who do not collect enough club and elected officials’ endorsements generally leave on their own recognizance.
“I don’t know of any other way of describing it than a slow and gradual process,” said Lori Sattler, who is running in the Ninth District.
Sattler was not among the three finalists chosen by a panel filling a 2004 countywide vacancy. A panel to fill the vacancy of a judge forcibly retired by a law which bars him from sitting past age 70 picked her this year, though, and once they did, the local elected officials lined up behind her. The other two finalists dropped from the race.
Since panel applicants are not formally announced, it is unclear how many people the three beat out for selection for the panel, but among them was Andrew Tulloch, a veteran politically-active East Sider who was seen as the choice of Rep. Carolyn Maloney, to whom he is closely connected.
“Panels are unpredictable,” explained Arthur Greig, the Democratic County Committee’s law chair. “I always tell people you don’t want to be the favorite going into the panel. It’s like a bulls-eye on your back going into the panel.”
Without primary or general election opposition, Sattler had essentially been elected to the Civil Court by July, though no levers will actually be pulled until November. Unless she dies or drops out of the race, she will be a Civil Court judge next January.
Tulloch accepted the panel’s decision and chose not to proceed with his candidacy, though he could have. Panel recommendations tend to be adhered to as a matter of tradition and courtesy, but certainly not as a matter of necessity.
That was Verena Rivera Powell’s approach. A solo practitioner attorney, she was not among the panel’s choices for a vacancy in the Seventh District. The panel instead chose three other candidates to replace Stephen Gottlieb, who is also aging off the court: both William Ramos and Robert Reed, who were also chosen by the East Side panel, and Louis Nock, who had worked for many years in the courts and just recently entered private practice.
Nock’s years of political activism helped earn him the backing of the clubs, and Ramos and Reed dropped from this race as well.
Meanwhile, Powell independently collected signatures to be a Democratic candidate.
The Democratic County Committee challenged the validity of those signatures and also alleged that Powell does not currently live at the address she listed on her petitions, succeeding in tossing her from the ballot.
As of press time, Powell was awaiting a court order she believes will eventually return her to the ballot. But the County Committee has filed papers with the county Supreme Court alleging that Powell and others engaged in election irregularities.
“I think the problem was they didn’t like how I went about it. I think they preferred I would have gone through their system and was voted out,” Powell said, attempting to explain the efforts against her.
Like Sattler on the East Side, Nock was headed for neither primary nor general election opposition. Then, for reasons no one seems either publicly or privately to understand, and which Nock apparently did not disclose to anyone in advance or since, he suddenly dropped out of the race three weeks ago. Nock has stayed silent on dropping out, skipping an arranged phone interview and not returning subsequent calls to his office.
The Democratic Party was left without a candidate. The Republican Party had not fielded one at all.
As rarely happens, an open seat on the Civil Court is without any major party candidate.
“It’s the craziest thing. No one ever heard of a situation like this,” said former City Council Member Stanley Michels.
“Books are going to be written about this one.”
Michels is assisting the efforts of his daughter, Shari Michels, who is attempting to get on the ballot as the candidate of the Equal Justice Party, which she created for the purposes of this run.
Michels unsuccessfully applied to the panel for this vacancy. Once Nock dropped, she started an independent run, which requires her to collect 3,000 signatures by August 22.
She is running on the full legacy of her father, who served 24 years on the City Council before being forced out by term limits in 2001. He has old friends and people who owe him favors he can call on for his daughter, but he also has some old foes, like Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer. Michels faced Stringer in last year’s Democratic primary for borough president, launching fierce attacks against Stringer.
In the world of local politics, this sort of history can prove very relevant.
Kelly O’Neill Levy, a principal court attorney in the county Supreme Court, is also pursuing an independent bid. She wants to be the candidate of the Northern Manhattan Party, which she also created to run. In addition to being backed by several prominent Democrats, O’Neill Levy was a finalist from a 2003 panel for a countywide vacancy, and by a panel for a district vacancy this year— which just happens to have been in the exact same district.
That vacancy was created when Faviola Soto, who had held one of the Seventh District’s other seats, was appointed by the governor to the Court of Claims. O’Neill Levy was one of three women named finalists by that panel, though she left the field to the other two when Nock abandoned his candidacy.
That left Mary Rosado and Rita Mella in a dogfight for the Democratic nomination. Mella seems on track to win the endorsements of many elected officials and clubs.
Though such endorsements are always important in low-profile races, Rosado contends that her efforts to appeal directly to voters will lead her to victory.
Either Mella or Rosado will be the Democratic nominee after Sept. 12.
Presuming Michels and O’Neill Levy collect enough signatures to appear on the November ballot, there will be three candidates in front of voters in the Seventh District. The two top vote-getters will be elected, meaning that both independent candidates could be elected—though given the arrangement on the ballot of the candidates, the Democratic nominee is likely to be within easy reach, whereas the independent candidates will probably be all the way at the lower right.
“These made up parties are going to be all the way down,” said Greig, the Democratic county law chair. “The people who vote for that are going to have to really know that they’re going to vote for one of these gals, because it’s going to be really hard to find.”
Almost none of the issues and vagaries involved in the races for the other three open Civil Court seats come to bear in the Second District. Three candidates are attempting to succeed Martin Shulman, who was elected to the Supreme Court last year: Margaret Chan, Andrea Masley and David Cohen.
No screening panel was convened. On their own, the candidates have hired campaign consultants and begun divvying up various endorsements from political clubs and elected officials, giving this race the closest resemblance to a standard political affair.
Masley even challenged the validity of Chan’s petition signatures though she dropped the challenge last week when the Board of Elections ruled that Chan was very close to the necessary 1,500 signatures.
Since this is the one race for a Civil Court vacancy which has from the outset been in the hands of the mass of voters on Primary Day, the three candidates are all traveling the standard campaign route, appearing at subway stops and community events, handing out pamphlets and brochures.
Without any other candidates expected in the general election, the primary winner will go to the court.
Cohen, who already serves as an appointed housing court judge within the Civil Court, said the experience of running for this new job had been surprising.
“When you get out there and you meet people on the streets and in the communities and you understand issues better,” he said, “when you go back to your courtroom during the day, I think it makes you a better rounded and more capable judge.”
As confusing and convoluted as the system is, many still contend that it succeeds in putting the most qualified people on the bench. Among its defenders is Assembly Member Herman “Denny” Farrell, the Manhattan Democratic county leader.
“It’s nothing odd. It’s called politics,” he said of the level of activity in this year’s races. “Every year you go through different cycles and different things happen. Nothing untoward about it, nothing illegal about it. It’s the way things happen.”