Hear Ye, Hear Ye, Here Comes The Judge

As Election Day grows closer, the rhetoric picks up. In case you were unaware, this is actually considered an off-year election. No Presidential races; no race for Governor (at least not in New York); no races for US Senate or House of Representatives. Yet despite the lack of the big races, we in Rockland, and particularly those in Ramapo and Clarkstown, have some extremely important races that have garnered a great deal of public attention. But take a look at the sample ballot and before you get to the juicy local races you have the race for State Supreme Court.

The judicial races rarely generate the same heated comments that the local races do. Many people don’t know that in New York the Supreme Court is the trial court of general jurisdiction. Fewer still know that the people you elect are going to be serving 14 (yes, that is 14) year terms in office at a salary of $174,000 (as of 2014).

Who are these people? Without looking at a ballot, name how many of these judges will be elected Tuesday. How about naming the candidates, and what party (or parties) they are running on? Unless you are a die hard follower of all things political you are going to vote for someone you never heard of, and will most likely do so by voting along party lines, for if all else fails how else to vote? You will be voting for people who live somewhere within the five counties that make up the 9th Judicial District (Rockland, Orange, Westchester, Putnam & Dutchess). To be fair, it is quite a challenge to run a campaign across a single county, let alone across five counties. The judges have tremendous power over a variety of subjects, including decisions affecting political disputes. The higher appellate courts in the state pick their judges from the elected Supreme Court judges, so who you elect and what their beliefs are on issues of tremendously important significance matters here. Unlike a town justice, you are electing people who may in the not too distant future decide issues of Constitutional magnitude.

So lets pretend for a moment that you want to invest some of your time to make an informed decision in this race on Tuesday (remember, the key is pretend, because for the average person that just is not an easily obtained objective). You will get nice mailings, but is that any way to (pardon the pun) judge someone running for Supreme Court? Most if not all will have nice websites, so you can begin a little homework there. You can Google them and see what comes up regarding them – depending on whether they are the incumbent or not, you can find prior court decisions and see how they have decided past cases. You can search court records for further details. But the truth is there is no easy way to figure out which of these people to vote for. Go for the good-looking people (subjective and appalling at the same time)? Pick a name you like and go with it? Maybe you ran into one campaigning and liked what they had to say (I talked to one very nice gentleman at a local street fair, but have no idea if he would be the best qualified to decide cases for the next 14 years.

I won’t even delve into how these people became the choices of their particular political parties, which some of the readers are already familiar with, and will be the subject of a future piece post-election day.

This is just another one of the strange ways we elect our public officials in New York. Here I think their political beliefs may indeed be in part based upon their political parties, but most people will gloss over this race, select the appropriate number of people, and quickly forget about it and move on. Maybe that is the best course of action; certainly it is the path of least resistance.