Broken bench:

Abusing law in NY tiny 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 labourers - 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 coloured 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."

Long-time justice

And several people in the small town of Dannemora we re intimidated by their long-time 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 neighbour 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."

The New York Times spent a year examining the life and history of this largely hidden world, a constellation of 1,971 part-time justices, from the suburbs of New York City to the farm towns near Niagara Falls. It is impossible to say just how many of those justices are ill-informed or abusive.

Legal rights

But The Times reviewed public documents dating back decades and, unannounced, visited courts in every part of the state. It examined records of closed disciplinary hearings. It tracked down defendants, and interviewed prosecutors and defense lawyers, plaintiffs and bystanders. The examination found overwhelming evidence that decade after decade and up to this day, people have often been denied fundamental legal rights.

Defendants have been jailed illegally. Others have been subjected to racial and sexual bigotry so explicit it seems to come from some other place and time. People have been denied the right to a trial, an impartial judge and the presumption of innocence.

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. Another, in Westchester County, had warned the police not to arrest his political cronies for drunken driving, and asked a Lebanese-American with a parking ticket if she was a terrorist.

A third, in Delaware County, had been convicted of having sex with a mentally retarded woman in his care.

New York is one of about 30 states that still rely on these kinds of local judges, descendants of the justices who kept the peace in Colonial days, when lawyers were scarce. Many states, alarmed by mistakes and abuse, have moved in recent decades to rein in their authority or require more training.

Some, from Delaware to California, have overhauled the courts, scrapped them entirely or required that local judges be lawyers.

But New York has no such requirement. It demands more schooling for licensed manicurists and hair stylists. And it has left its justices with the same powers - more than in many states - even though governors, blue-ribbon commissions and others have been denouncing the courts as outdated and unjust since as far back as 1908, when a justice in Westchester County set up a roadside speed trap, fining drivers for whatever cash they were carrying.

Nearly a century later, a 76-year-old Elmira man who contested a speeding ticket in Newfield, outside Ithaca, was jailed without even a warning for three days in 2003 because he called the sheriff's deputy a liar." I thought, this is not America," said the man, Michael J. Pronti, who spent two years and $8,000 before a state appeals court ruled that he had been improperly jailed.

'Justice in the Dark'

It is tempting to view the justice courts as weak and inconsequential because the bulk of their business is traffic violations. Yet among their 2.2 million cases, the courts handle more than 300,000 criminal matters a year. Justices can impose jail sentences of up to two years. Even in the smallest cases, some have wielded powers and punishments far beyond what the law allows.

Justices are not screened for competence, temperament or even reading ability. The only requirement is that they be elected. But voters often have little inkling of the justices' power or their sometimes tainted records.

For the nearly 75 percent of justices who are not lawyers, the only initial training is six days of state-administered classes, followed by a true-or-false test so rudimentary that the official who runs it said only one candidate since 1999 had failed. A sample question for the justices: "Town and village justices must maintain dignity, order and decorum in their courtrooms" - true or false? The result, records and interviews show, is a second-class system of justice.

The first class - the city, county and higher courts - is familiar to anyone who has served on a jury or watched "Law & Order": hardly perfect, but a place of law-schooled judges, support staffs and strict rules.

The lower and far larger rung of town and village courts relies on part-time justices, most of them poorly paid, some without a single clerk. Those justices - two-thirds of all the state's judges - are not required to make transcripts or tape recordings of what goes on, so it is often difficult to appeal their decisions.

(New York Times)