NY has a very Opaque Court System.

Opinion: New York’s complex court bureaucracy shields judges from accountability Judges are less accountable to the public than to court administrators who arbitrarily shuffle them around to different courts and issue secret memos to guide their interpretation of the law.

Court administrators, who wield power to control where judges are assigned, have both directly advised judges in New York on how to interpret the law and have created administrative work-arounds around certain laws – such as with the recent bail reform – which have tacitly communicated to judges their view of how such laws should be interpreted.

Because court operations, like much of government work, happen largely in private and off the record, neither the public nor academia have been able to pay close attention to these institutional mechanisms of the court system.

Data and other information about the court system is also in short supply, and where it does exist, it tends to be limited to information about individual judges’ decisions, as opposed to systemic data that would inform the public in an accessible way about the internal incentives that affect judicial decision-making, as well as how judges are selected in the first place, or how and why they are moved around the court system.

The lack of transparency around court administration has allowed New York’s court system to metastasize into an impenetrable “courteaucracy” that’s far more confusing and multi-layered than other states’ court systems.

Currently, judges effectively serve for as long as they want, without any meaningful or public evaluation between their terms.

it’s also passively supported by the inability of anyone outside the judiciary, including elected officials with legal responsibilities in the judicial selection process, to penetrate the black box of court administration.

Judge Vincent Del Giudice’s time on the bench illustrates what happens when these dynamics come together. Del Giudice has spent 22 years as a judge, all of them served as an “Acting” Supreme Court Justice, despite the fact that he has never been elected or appointed to the Supreme Court – and despite a record that, upon inspection, shows that he is an extreme outlier on multiple concerning metrics.

He is a radical, but he has been on the bench for 22 years and gets shuffled around. He answers to know what but the judge administrators who can move him here or there.

Here is how the scam works:

First, a governor has nominated him three separate times – in 2002, 2005, and 2015 – to a little-used court called the Court of Claims, which exists only to hear lawsuits against the State of New York. Second, the state Senate has confirmed him each of those times. And third, the court administration reassigned him to the Supreme Court in 2002, and it has not changed his assignment since.

And this is how they push radical judges into position of power without any accountability from voters.

The ongoing lack of accountability for judges like Del Giudice, whose errors and excessive sentencing other judges repeatedly have to correct, is made possible by the lack of transparency around judicial actions, judicial administration and judicial selection. Elected officials keep appointing Del Giudice despite his record, and the Office of Court Administration is seemingly happy to keep him presiding in Supreme Court, no matter how many lives he ruins. On top of all this, his most recent term expired in 2022, but neither the court system nor the political actors responsible for appointing judges seem to care that he’s still on the bench.

It's even worse than you can imagine:

We see this same lack of transparency and accountability to the public elsewhere in the court system, including in the court administration’s issuing of secret memos that reduce due process rights, in the same administration’s refusal to release updated data on drug courts, in administrative work-arounds that undermine legislation, in county political party leaders deciding judicial nominees behind closed doors, in judges only publishing a fraction of their opinions and much more.

New York's judicial system is opaque and who actually appointed Merchan is well hidden. Who decides decisions is hidden. Who TOLD Merchan to make those decisions is hidden.

Trump is highlighting the incredible corruption of the ACTING judge system of New York.

This bureaucratic nonsense is probably happening in other state courts too. Transparency is the only way.

Similar to the Scaramucci model Q spoke of

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