New York’s Tiny Courts – Incompetent and Unsupervised

In a three part series, the New York Times examines the New York State’s town and village court systems. These1250 town and village courts (or justice courts as they are more commonly known) do not enjoy a great reputation; most of them are considered as avenues of handling simple things like traffic tickets or small claims. These courts are known for their in competencies and most professional and high quality lawyers do not associate themselves with this part of the New York legal system.

The analysis shows that some courtrooms are not even courtrooms but just tiny offices or basement rooms with no judge bench or jury box. In some courtrooms, the public is not allowed admission and witnesses are not even sworn in to tell the truth. There is also no word-for-word record of the proceedings.

The NY Times review also found that three quarters of the judges in these courts are not lawyers and have scant grasp of basic legal principles. There are some who did not even pass through high school and at least one who did not go further than grade school. Despite the poor state of affairs, decisions are taken in these courts and people are sent to jail without a guilty plea or a proper trial. They are tosses from their homes without any proper legal proceeding. Defendants are often refused a lawyer, which is a clear violation of the law, and are sentenced to weeks in jail if they are unable to pay their fines. Women in fear of abuse are often denied protection.

However, sometimes people get the raw end of the deal when they end up in such courts. For example, a woman in Malone NY was seeking an order of protection against her husband on the grounds that he had choked her, kicked her in the stomach and had threatened to kill her. But a judge in one of these so-called justice courts refused her please and in fact told the court that a woman needs a good pounding every now and then.

A large number of decisions taken by these tiny courts are ill-informed or abusive of the state’s legal system and yet these little courts continue to run, unsupervised. State court officials are unaware of what is happening in these courts and how many cases are mishandled here. This largely hidden and incompetent justice system of New York needs to be taken seriously and steps need to be taken to fix the ridiculous decisions that are enforced on the people who suffer through their incompetency.