Cyrus Dugger

Plan to Revamp N.Y. Justice Courts Is Announced

From the New York Times:

ALBANY, Nov. 21 —New York’s top judicial officials outlined a plan today to begin revamping the state’s 300-year old system of town and village courts, which have been criticized for decades as outmoded, unsupervised and unfair.
The plan, announced here by the state’s chief judge, Judith S. Kaye, included some measures that critics of the courts have been recommending for years. Among them is a plan to require that the local courts — known as justice courts — begin keeping a word-for-word record of their proceedings, as every other court in the state does.
The justice courts are a sprawling system of more than 1,200 courts that are often the first — and frequently the only — stop in the legal system for cases outside New York City. Dating from Colonial times, the courts occupy something of a time warp, with justices who are often poorly trained, who may hold hearings in firehouses, town highway garages or their own kitchens, and who dispense a form of justice unlike any other in the state.

“These courts must provide the same high standard of justice the public expects and deserves from any court in New York,” Judge Kaye said.

On the other hand,

[T]he judiciary’s plan stopped short of dealing with many aspects of the justice court system that attracted complaints…The judiciary plan would not, for example, require that justices in the town and village local courts be lawyers, as they must be in every other court in New York. Three-quarters of the town and village justices are not lawyers; some are sewer workers, plumbers or farmers. That, the officials said in a report accompanying today’s announcement, is “among the great challenges in New York governance.”

Good first step, let's keep the process going.....

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Posted at 7:05 PM, Nov 21, 2006 in
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