It’s hard to get our mind around the decision of the New York Court system’s Administrative Board to summarily do away the with the services of 46 out of 49 senior judges, including both trial and appellate judges.
Under the New York State Constitution, New York judges must retire by age 70 but can apply for an extension until age 76, with such requests to be granted based upon an evaluation of the judge’s mental and physical competency and whether the judge’s service is necessary for expediting the court’s business.
However, reportedly, after Governor Cuomo announced that he would be slashing the judiciary budget by 10 percent, or approximately $300 million, Chief Administrative Judge Lawrence Marks announced that the court’s administrative board had decided “to disapprove all but a small handful of pending judicial applications… that would take effect on January 1, 2021.” He also said that letting the judges go would save the court system about $55 million.
Without us getting into the legal implications, Judge Marks did not address how it came about that 46 of 49 recently sitting judges suddenly became incompetent with no potential for expediting the work of the court system. Indeed, we have not seen any record of any of the required evaluations.
At a time when the court system continues to accumulate an ever-growing corona-induced backlog of cases – already numbering in the many thousands – getting rid of senior and experienced judges seems to be as wrongheaded as one can get.
While we recognize that the budgetary process necessarily has a dynamic of its own, there is another oddity at play here. All the judges whose extension applications were denied are entitled to sizeable pensions, roughly in the same ballpark as their salaries would have been if they would have continued on the bench. They will perform no services going forward for these pension payments. So what’s gained by letting them go?
We recognize that salaries and pensions are paid out of different pots. But if the goal is to get the courts up and running again, every angle should be taken into account in trying to reach it.
Hopefully Governor Cuomo and the court administrators will reconsider their positions and this wholly ill-advised and counterproductive plan will be abandoned.