We were disappointed to learn that Civil Court Judge Noach Dear, a prominent member of Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish community, was not selected last week by the Kings County Democratic Party executive committee (made up of Brooklyn district leaders) as a Democratic nominee for one of the open Kings County Supreme Court seats to be filled in the November 4election.
Mr. Dear now serves as an acting Supreme Court justice by designation of the chief administrator of the New York State Courts. The four choices the committee did make were approved at the party’s judicial convention the next day and, given the overwhelming majority of registered Democrats in Brooklyn, are virtually guaranteed to be elected in November.
In any contest there are winners and losers. But what irks in this case is that the process did not allow for any informed rebuttal of the spurious charges made against Judge Dear by some opponents at the executive committee meeting, even though they reportedly were key factors in his rejection.
Considerations of race, religion, and ethnicity are unfortunately significant if not dispositive factors in determining who gets to run in general judicial elections with party endorsement. From the appearance of it, this episode was no different and an indication that the Brooklyn Democratic establishment doesn’t care all that much about our community.
Before his ascension to the Civil Court bench in 2007, Judge Dear was opposed by some who spread the same negative stories concerning several projects and initiatives of his while he served as an outspoken and activist member of the New York City Council.
Yet he was elected to the bench and proceeded to make a very positive contribution as a judge – as even many of his erstwhile critics have acknowledged.
To our mind, the only relevance the negative stories had was whether, even if true, they pointed to unfitness for judicial office. Plainly they did not, since his record on the bench did not play a material role in the opposition to his nomination at the executive committee meeting. Indeed, in order to have been designated an acting Supreme Court justice he had to undergo an elaborate vetting process involving many parts of the judicial system, which he successfully did.
Particularly galling was the complaint by one Jo Anne Simon about Judge Dear’s supposed “mobilizing on behalf of apartheid and his insensitivity to minority communities.” Ms. Simon was just nominated as the Democratic candidate in the 52nd Assembly District. In November, she will run against Republican candidate John Jasilli in a race that bears watching.
More to the point, for the past ten years she has been the female district leader in the 52nd Assembly District, consisting mostly of upscale neighborhoods including Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, and parts of Park Slope. As for demographics, the 52nd is 77 percent white and 7 percent black. So she hardly qualifies as a spokesperson for minorities.
In any event, as we recall it, the “mobilizing” of which she spoke so disparagingly actually involved an effort by then-Councilman Dear, initially in coordination with three of the then-leading black city councilmen, to expose South African leaders to alternative thinking about apartheid and initiate a one-on-one dialogue.
Further, in a much-publicized decision, Judge Dear dismissed a complaint against a Latino charged by the NYPD with violating New York City’s prohibition against drinking alcohol in public. The man had been drinking a cup of beer on a city sidewalk. Judge Dear ruled that the police had failed to prove the drink’s alcohol content exceeded the illegality threshold of 0.5 percent. Although the drink certainly smelled of alcohol and the defendant admitted that what he was drinking was beer, the content of the cup was never tested to determine the level of alcohol.