Five of the most powerful judges in New York are meeting this summer to decide who among their aging colleagues can keep their jobs past the state’s constitutionally mandated retirement age of 70.
Certification, as it’s known, repeats every year and allows the state to continue seating Supreme Court justices — the judges who serve on the state’s main trial bench — in an effort to ease the strain on an overburdened judiciary. A judge can seek as many as three two-year extensions until they reach the age of 76. In recent years, there’s been a push to raise the retirement age outright. But certification happens through a process that critics say is opaque and shields the court from public accountability.
The decision to allow a judge to continue belongs to the Administrative Board of the Courts, a group made up of the state’s chief judge and the presiding justices of the four appellate divisions. The state’s highest court has held that the board has “very nearly unfettered discretion” over the process. The board gives no notice of its decisions — no announcement of who is approved, who is turned away or why. It takes public comment, but those submissions are, like the rest of the process, kept confidential.
That makes it impossible to know how the board weighs potentially troubling marks on a judge's record. Even basic statistics about the number of judges denied certification are not made public.
This year, 49 justices of the Supreme Court are seeking permission to stay. Among them are judges whom appellate courts found handed out excessive sentences or mishandled questions about evidence, according to a Gothamist review of records compiled by judicial transparency group Scrutinize. In some cases, appellate courts took the rare step of handing their cases to different judges. One was censured by the state’s Commission on Judicial Conduct for concealing a $50,000 loan.
“I think that a process where there is zero transparency and there is zero accountability, where court officials just meet and get to a decision without anybody knowing why, what information they considered, which factors were relevant, that is extremely problematic,” said Oded Oren, the founder and director of Scrutinize.
Reversed decisions
In the past, the certification process has rarely drawn headlines. But last year, for the first time, the Center for Community Alternatives seized on the process as a rare opportunity to remove a judge from the bench. That effort ultimately failed, but the group is trying again this year, this time with objections to four judges.
In a 24-page letter submitted to the Administrative Board during a public comment period, Peter Martin and Katie Schaffer of the Center for Community Alternatives objected to certifying Mario Mattei of Staten Island, Laura Ward of Manhattan, Timothy Mazzei of Suffolk County and Thomas Moran of Monroe County. They wrote the justices’ records demonstrated “that they do not possess the legal ability and competence necessary for continued judicial service.”
The letter pairs aggregate data from Scrutinize with specific examples of reversed decisions and cases.
“Both the quantity and quality of the reversals were what concerned us and led us to the conclusion that these judges don't deserve any more time on the bench,” Martin said.
None of the four judges responded to requests for comment. In a statement, spokesperson Al Baker said the Unified Court System welcomes “responsible submissions from interested persons” including the Center for Community Alternatives for public comment.
Moran, the Monroe County judge, receives the most attention in the letter. Martin and Schaffer allege an “appearance of bias in favor of law enforcement,” citing a series of appellate findings. In one case they cite, Moran allowed a juror to be seated after she acknowledged she would have difficulty being impartial because “I'm close to them, you know, the law enforcement.”
Appellate courts have overturned Moran’s evidence rulings six times in 51 appeals raising those issues, a rate higher than 86% of judges whose cases involve evidence suppression issues, according to Scrutinize data. Twice, the appellate courts reassigned cases away from him, something a Scrutinize analysis found happened just 66 times in nearly 50,000 state appellate criminal decisions between 2007 and 2023. And they cut a 20-years-to-life sentence Moran had imposed on a man the appeals court described as a serial shoplifter who had never inflicted violence on anyone, reducing it to 5.5 to 11 years.
Moran also presided over a high-profile wrongful conviction. Anthony Miller spent six years in prison after Moran ruled the stop-and-frisk that led to his arrest was legal. An appellate court eventually threw out the case, citing "considerable, objective evidence" of Miller’s innocence. The judges on the panel then addressed Moran’s ruling on the stop-and-frisk directly, noting that “the law does not allow the police to stop and frisk any young Black man within a half-mile radius of an armed robbery based solely upon a general description.” A judge later awarded Miller $3 million.
Mazzei, who sentenced Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann to life in prison last month, drew one of the sharpest rebukes in the letter. In 2022, an appeals court threw out a sentence he had imposed and handed the resentencing off to a different judge after finding Mazzei had “improperly speculated” that the woman had committed other similar crimes but hadn’t been caught. Separately, appellate courts found five of his sentences excessive, a record higher than 99.5% of judges who have had at least one criminal case go to appeal, and cut them by a combined 30 years, according to data from Scrutinize.
Two defense attorneys contacted Gothamist unprompted this week to defend Mazzei, describing him as consistently even-handed and professional. William J. Keahon of Hauppauge emailed first, calling Mazzei “the fairest judge to try a case in front of.” John H. LoTurco of Huntington followed, saying that Mazzei was “exceptionally diligent in protecting a defendant’s constitutional rights and ensuring that every litigant receives a fair trial.”
LoTurco said he had heard about Gothamist's then-unpublished reporting about the certification process from Keahon. Keahon said he'd heard about it from a member of the media, but declined to say who.
Ward’s suppression rulings have been reversed five times out of 74 appeals, and each of those reversals ended with the indictment dismissed, according to court records. The appellate division also twice reversed her for allowing defendants with histories of mental illness to represent themselves without conducting the required inquiry to make sure they understood the consequences of giving up their right to a lawyer.
The letter alleges Mattei’s reversals show a pattern of illegal and excessive sentencing. Twice, records show, appellate courts determined the sentences he had imposed were excessive because he had set them to run consecutively. In two other cases, the consecutive terms were ruled unlawful, according to court documents. All told, the changes cut more than 40 years from the sentences Mattei had imposed.
Appeals courts also overturned two of his convictions over jury errors. In one case, Mattei accepted a partial verdict without questioning a juror who told him that she was too distraught to keep deliberating. In the other, the judge gave jurors the wrong blood-alcohol threshold in a drunken-driving case.
‘We make tough decisions’
Of the four, Mattei is the only justice who is up for certification for the first time; the others have all been approved at least once before. Because the process is opaque, it’s unclear whether the Administrative Board had considered the decisions the Center for Community Alternatives highlighted during past certifications.
Martin, with the Center for Community Alternatives, could recall only one time the board was known to have denied judges en masse. In September 2020, with the state judiciary facing a $300 million budget cut, the court system said 46 of the 49 applicants would be denied certification. Eventually, though, state finances recovered and the judges were allowed to reapply. At the time, The Queens Daily Eagle wrote that until then, certification had been “a formality” for judges who passed a cognitive exam.
“It's like many other processes and decisions that the Office of Court Administration makes in that information that we believe New Yorkers absolutely should have access to — and have a right to have access to — they don't,” Martin said.
It’s possible, Oren from Scrutinize said, that the judges meet and decide a fair number of the applicants are not qualified and deny them certification.
“But we don’t know,” he said. “For all we know, the entire process is just a rubber stamp to let people stay a bit longer on the bench.”
Baker, the court system spokesperson, did not respond to questions about the certification process beyond noting that public comment was welcome.
Rolando Acosta sat on the Administrative Board for six years as the presiding justice of the First Department until his retirement in 2023. He describes the process as much more than a formality. The justices, he said, undergo a medical exam and evaluations by their supervisors, and the chief administrative judge compiles a dossier of each applicant’s judicial record.
Acosta called it “a very thorough process in terms of the work ethic of the judge (and) recommendations from the supervisors … participating directly in the daily functions of that judge.”
He added that the open comment period — this year, seven weeks during which the public was invited to email or write the board with insights about the justices’ legal ability, competence and demeanor — gives critics “a chance, one more lick at that judge if they think that that judge lacks the temperament, doesn't work hard enough, has mishandled too many things, etc.”
Still, Acosta said he’s wary of campaigns that target individual justices.
“You also have to understand that judges are not bystanders. We make tough decisions that generally upset one side or the other,” he said.
