In Tiny Courts of New York, Abuses of Law and Power

[cal04]

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 laborers — 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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/25/nyregion/25courts.html?hp&ex=1159156800&en=b147c1dfe3dac7ef&ei=5094&partner=homepage

[tocqueville]

1. election of judges is doomed to fail

officials are to be appointed due to competence and merit by an elected body. Applies to all civil servants.
This is not democracy, it's mob rule.

[NYC]

2. Fascinating article.

I had no idea.