Saturday, January 09, 2010
JUDICIAL REFORM EFFORTS IN NEW YORK ARE FAILING
According to Reform of New York’s Small-Town Courts Stalls, a "modest compromise bill" pending before the Legislature to revamp the state’s network of inferior courts is failing. The article goes on to say:
The most ambitious efforts in decades to reform New York State’s vast network of small-town courts — where sessions can be held in a garage, and where more than 1,450 judges who are not lawyers conduct trials —have stalled in Albany. Even a seemingly modest compromise, one that would allow a defendant to request that the judge be a lawyer, seems doomed, its sponsor says...After a series of articles in The New York Times in 2006 showed extensive failings in the courts — including town and village justices who mishandled money, made racist remarks, released friends without bail, denied some defendants lawyers and jailed some of them without trials — state court officials appointed that commission, which concluded by proposing the measure that Mr. O’Donnell later introduced (emphasis added).
Sadly, the problems revealed in New York sound all too familiar.
Labels: Institutional Mismanagement, Judicial Reform, Sixth Amendment
