Chair of Judicial Conduct Commission
Solicits Contributions for DA Candidate
Who Awarded Him Judicial Patronage;
Dissents from Removal of Bad Judges

By Henry J. Stern
May 27, 2005

An ethical issue has been raised with regard to letters sent by the chair of the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct soliciting funds for Leslie Crocker Snyder, an attorney who is challenging District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau in the September Democratic primary.
 
The Commission on Judicial Conduct is an 11-member body, chosen by the governor, the chief judge, and legislative leaders.  Its chair is Lawrence Goldman, a Manhattan attorney.  He was re-appointed to the Commission for a four-year term by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver in 2002.  Goldman was originally appointed by former speaker Mel Miller in 1990.
 
The Commission's members serve part time, meeting one day every six weeks.  They review complaints about judicial corruption or other misbehavior, and decide whether punitive action is warranted.  The Commission has a full-time staff of 29 professionals, including lawyers and investigators.  The eleven Commissioners receive no salary, but are reimbursed for transportation expenses.  The group usually meets in New York City. 
 
The story of the solicitation is told by Fredric U. Dicker in Wednesday's Post, under the headline, 'ANTI-MORGY POL IN ETHICS $CRAP.  (The last word in that headline is SCRAP, with the dollar sign taking the place of the letter S.  It should not be read in any other way.)   The Post article appeared at the top of page 2, which is excellent placement for a story which could have been relegated to the shopping section because nobody outside a relatively small circle knows who Goldman is.  A similar article, by Celeste Katz, headed 'DONATIONS TIFF IN DA RACE' can be found on p17 of Wednesday's Daily News. 
 
What happened in this case is that lawyer Goldman wrote a form letter which he sent to many of his professional colleagues, asking them to contribute to Ms. Snyder's campaign.  One of the letters, intentionally or inadvertently, went to Thomas Liotti, who is a criminal defense lawyer and part-time town justice in Westbury, in Nassau County.
 
Judges are not allowed to contribute to political campaigns, except their own, so sending that letter was inappropriate.  But that is a relatively minor infraction, although Liotti once had a matter before the Commission on Judicial Conduct, in which he was a complainant rather than a defendant. Goldman's solicitation came to public attention when Liotti complained about it; we do not know of any other judges who were asked for money.  Goldman concedes that writing Liotti was an error, he did not remember that the man was a part-time judge.  But there is much more to this situation than the letter that reached Liotti.

In an editorial published yesterday on p50, JUDGES' JUDGE NEEDS HIGHER STANDARDS, the Daily News discusses the prior relationship of fundraiser chairman Goldman, and former judge, now candidate Snyder.  We link and we quote:
 

"...Judges should not be subject to the temptation of providing special courtesies to commissioners, nor should opposing litigants face even an appearance of conflict.

"Goldman has brushed off those considerations as hypertechnical niceties.  Now, though, he is not just practicing before judges, he's also asking them to fatten his wallet by granting large, court-ordered fees.  Would any judge dare quibble with his $450-an-hour rate?

"The conflict arises because then-Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Leslie Crocker Snyder had the poor judgment to appoint Goldman, an old friend, as a special master in 2001 -- and Goldman, a commission member since 1990, had the worse judgment to accept.  Snyder is now trying to unseat Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, and Goldman is helping her raise her campaign funds.

"Snyder assigned Goldman to oversee the restitution of $11 million to victims in a stock fraud case.  She approved $25,000 in fees for him before she retired from the bench, and Justice Charles Solomon later okayed an additional $25,000.  Goldman says he expects to ask Solomon to grant him at least $150,000 more.

"Asked about the propriety of the arrangement, Goldman said commission rules do not bar members from taking court assignments or submitting bills to judges, who are supposed to check whether fees are justified.  But, while saying his fees will be below recommended guidelines, he also allowed as how working over fees with a judge could raise questions.  Indeed.

"The commission is the public's only check on judicial behavior.  Deliberating in secret at the order of the Legislature, it tends to lapse into clubbiness.  Most recently, it declined to bounce two judges richly deserved dismissal, choosing censure instead."

 
Goldman is a state official who reviews the conduct of judges and participates in deciding whether they should be removed from the bench.  For him to write letters soliciting money from lawyers to elect a district attorney is not illegal, but questions arise as to its propriety and the impression it may convey.  In some states, a judicial conduct officer cannot be involved in any judicial campaign, but tolerant New York is not among them.

District Attorneys usually have a greater impact on the criminal justice system than individual judges.  In New York County (Manhattan, to most people) there is one district attorney and hundreds of judges. The DA decides which cases should be prosecuted; while the judges preside over those cases that are assigned to them.
 
The problem of participation in partisan politics piques one's interest in Goldman's record as a commissioner.  He is its longest serving member (since 1990), his current four year term, his fourth, will expire in March 2006.  He does not hold over until a successor is appointed, because the length of his term is specified precisely by state law.
 
His solicitation on behalf of a judge who previously rewarded him with judicial patronage raises issues as to what kind of a commissioner he has been.  In the vernacular applied to judges, Goldman is much more "free 'em" than "fry 'em".
 
In a number of recent cases before the Commission, Goldman has shown himself  to be particularly merciful in dealing with judicial misconduct.  Although he concurs in findings of guilt (which have been demonstrated clearly by the facts in each case), he is extremely reluctant to remove a judge from his robe and chambers,  which is the only sanction the Commission can impose that goes beyond a slap on the wrist  (admonition, or censure without fine or suspension) .
 
For example, Brooklyn Surrogate Michael Feinberg gave over nine million dollars in fees from 475 estates to his Manhattan Beach (that's the expensive area east of Brighton Beach, between Sheepshead Bay and the Atlantic Ocean) neighbor and Brooklyn Law School buddy, Louis Rosenthal.  In many of these cases, the fees the judge allowed were exorbitant.  In five and one half years, Rosenthal never submitted the affidavit required by law with an application for fees.  His requests for payment were handwritten on post-it notes attached to the case file.  They were always approved by Surrogate Feinberg. 
 
Rosenthal demanded and received a flat eight per cent of each estate, regardless of the amount of work he did on the case.  A 1988 agreement between the State Attorney General  (Abrams), the Kings County Surrogate (Sobel), and the Counsel to the Public Administrator (Rosenthal) set a maximum fee of six per cent of each estate, except in unusual circumstances.  When the Commission on Judicial Conduct voted in February 2005 to remove Feinberg as Kings County Surrogate, Goldman wrote a lengthy dissent from the Commission's decision., taking that the position that the penalty was excessive
 
Consider the case of Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Reynold Mason, who took money from escrow accounts, both as a lawyer and as a judge, and spent $26,000 on checks to himself, plus $4,000 in checks made out to cash.  He spent this money, which did not belong to him, for personal travel and political contributions.  Mason was removed from the bench in 2002, with Goldman dissenting.  The dismissal was upheld by the Court of Appeals. Mason was subsequently disbarred for this misconduct.
 
An unusual case, in that it did not involve greed, was decided in 2004.  Henry Bauer, a city court judge in Troy (across the Hudson River from Albany), when dealing with minor offenses, including riding a bicycle on the sidewalk, imposed bail of $25,000 on young people who were not represented by counsel.
 
Unable to make bail, the defendants were remanded to city jail, where they languished for periods of up to seven days before Judge Bauer saw them again.  At that time, the defendants were offered a plea bargain.  If they pleaded guilty, they were sentenced to time served, which means they would be released immediately.  If they pleaded not guilty, they would be sent back to jail until their case could be heard.  Understandably, nearly everyone pleaded guilty.
 
The situation is made more bizarre by the fact that, in many of these cases, the original offense was not punishable by a jail term, even if those accused had been convicted.  The Commission voted to remove Judge Bauer for numerous instances of the unusual practice of instant incarceration for minor offenses.  Goldman again dissented from the decision.

In each of the cases cited here, Goldman was joined in dissent by two others, out of the eleven members of the Commission.  But his co-dissenters varied from case to case, while Goldman was the most consistent voice for keeping deeply flawed judges on the bench.
 
Although he chairs the commission (he has the most seniority by far), he appears to be in substantial disagreement with many of the other Commissioners, who insist on higher standards of judicial conduct.  This does not reflect on Goldman's professional ability as an attorney.  Nor do we have evidence of any inappropriate intervention which may have influenced his decisions.
 
It is Goldman's judgment in these cases which we find puzzling.  Perhaps over his many years on the Commission, he has become more tolerant of judicial misbehavior, and more in sync with Albany's laissez-faire attitude with regard to ethical standards.  If that be the case, he may not be the most suitable person in the State of New York to chair its Commission on Judicial Conduct.

AMPLIFICATIONS, CORRECTIONS AND EXCUSES:

The Chief Judge (not Justice) of the Court of Appeals of the State of New York is JUDITH
S. KAYE.  The name given incorrectly belonged to a woman who was a leader of the Riverside Democrats, a reform club, along with William Fitts Ryan (1922-72).

The Bronx High School of Science numbers six Nobel Prize winners among its alumni, not five.
The lower number was given on the Bronx Science website. They named Leon Cooper,
Melvin Schwartz, Sheldon Glashow,  Steven Weinberg, and Russell Holtz.  They omitted David Pollitzer, who received the Nobel Prize for physics in 2004.  Please update the site.

Writing about Bronx Science, which I did Monday in Q-52, I cited an article in the Post.
A column on the controversy at the school, written by Andrew Wolf, appears in today's Sun.

Enjoy the Memorial Day weekend.   If you don't receive this column until you return to work, I hope that you had a good time.  At least once, think of the purpose of the holiday: to honor those who died so that we could remain free.