By Jessy Edwards

On his second day in office, Zohran Mamdani promised a new era for one of the mayor’s most powerful tools for reforming the criminal justice system—the process of how mayors appoint judges to the bench. The mayor appoints about 180 of our judges—roughly a third of the judges in New York City—who serve on the City’s Criminal Courts, where they handle misdemeanor cases as well as arraignments and bail for felony cases; Family Courts; and interim positions on Civil Courts.

“While the judicial branch plays a crucial role in our democracy, it is often inaccessible and shrouded in secrecy,” he said. “My administration will promote transparency in how we select New York City’s judges and ensure our City’s judicial system reflects the city it serves, applies the rule of law universally, and does so without favor.”

Standing before the central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, the mayor also introduced his pick to lead the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on the Judiciary, the body that would be driving this work: the Queens civil rights attorney Ali Najmi,[1] a longtime friend of Mamdani’s who for years had worked to diversify the borough’s bench, most recently as a judicial delegate in the Queens Democratic Party helping judges get elected in Queens. 

1. You might recall Najmi from our Case File on the Queens Democratic Party’s 2025 judicial nominating convention.

At the press conference that day, Hell Gate and Type Investigations asked Najmi about the new judicial selection process. What was most broken about the current system, we asked, and how would it be different working from inside City Hall, rather than within the county parties, which are known for putting judges forward based on political relationships, and not necessarily merit?

“Not enough people know about this system. Not enough people know about the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on the Judiciary, how to apply.[2] And not enough people historically have had confidence that if you were not the well-connected, or you were connected to a judge already, that you could be a judge,” he replied.

2. Here’s how the process works: Aspiring judges, who must be lawyers who have been approved to practice in New York state for at least 10 years, apply to the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on the Judiciary to be considered for a spot on the bench. The committee, currently a 19-member panel, then recommends people to the mayor, who then formally appoints them.

Najmi added, “But in fact, in this administration, the people who never thought they could be a judge but deserve to be one will finally have that chance.”

Overall, the administration hopes to make the process more democratic—including by encouraging more people to apply who have experience defending New Yorkers, rather than prosecuting them.

But questions soon arose about the transparency Mamdani had promised. Just a few days later, Mamdani appointed three new judges and reappointed nine others—including, to the disappointment of many in the legal community who spoke with Hell Gate and Type Investigations, Judge Althea Drysdale—one of the judges on our Courts of Contempt list, whom one defense attorney described to us as “rude and tyrannical” in the courtroom she runs.[3] In response to questions about Drysdale’s reappointment, Sam Raskin, a City Hall spokesperson, told Hell Gate and Type Investigations that the committee could not comment on Drysdale or any other judge’s qualifications, but that it plans to review all relevant information when considering judicial candidates, including reappointments.

3. Drysdale is currently serving as a judge on State Supreme Court, after being moved from Criminal Court to the higher court in 2019.

The committee declined to reappoint three others, according to sources in the legal community, but didn’t address why. “We don’t want to embarrass anybody,” Najmi told amNY. “People feel like they could be unfairly harmed in this process. Also, you’re not going to get people to apply. So preserving confidentiality is very important.”

This answer didn’t satisfy Oded Oren, the founder and executive director of Scrutinize, a judicial watchdog organization, who believes the committee should notify the public if it has declined to reappoint a judge and, if it does reappoint them, publish a report explaining how the judge met its criteria. “This is a decision for 10 more years on the bench,” Oren said. “We should get an explanation.”

Still, he and others who have long fought for change are now feeling cautiously optimistic that Mayor Mamdani’s promises will become a reality during his administration. He’s at least talking about the need for transparency and for change, unlike many of his predecessors. 

“I think that there is a note of hope in the air,” Oren said. “And that the process is going to be more open and more inclusive and not as beholden to backward politics as it used to be.”

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Why the mayor’s judicial appointees matter

This year, Najmi’s committee will make recommendations for nine Criminal Court judges, he told Hell Gate and Type Investigations, plus up to three Family Court judges and up to 12 interim Civil Court judges. These mayoral appointments are a big deal, advocates said—not only do Criminal Court judges, for example, decide who gets sent to Rikers Island before trial, but also, once the judges are ensconced in the lower courts, they are likely to be appointed by the Office of Court Administration to fill vacancies on New York City’s State Supreme Court bench.[4]

4. It’s common for judges on the municipal courts to be appointed by OCA to serve on the State Supreme Court in order to plug holes on the bench. After being elevated, judges will suddenly find themselves overseeing felony trials, or civil cases, in New York City, involving $50,000 or more in damages. This was the case for three judges on our Courts of Contempt list—the aforementioned Drysdale, Dale Fong-Frederick, and John Hecht.

Criminal justice reformers are especially excited about one of Najmi’s stated priorities: to recruit more judges with backgrounds as public defenders. “I definitely see a huge difference in the courtroom when a judge that was previously a defender comes in versus a prosecutor,” said Cory Rowe, an associate professor of criminal justice at LaGuardia Community College.

In mid-March, Najmi told Hell Gate and Type Investigations, “We want to give a chance to people who have been in the trenches working for poor people in Criminal Court…Attorneys who have represented such people have not had the attention that they deserve in the past, in my opinion, and they will get due consideration under this administration.”

Despite this, all three of the administration’s first new judicial appointments are former prosecutors. Raskin, the City Hall spokesperson, told Hell Gate and Type Investigations that prosecutors bring valuable perspectives, and that due to the urgent need to fill vacancies and to reduce the backlog in the City’s courts, the Mamdani administration moved quickly to choose people from the pool of eligible, already-vetted candidates. MACJ, he said, is committed to having judges with a diversity of professional backgrounds on the bench.

Judges with law enforcement backgrounds are already vastly overrepresented in New York City’s Criminal Courts. And the background of judges does appear to impact pretrial detention decisions, and therefore, the urgent question of reducing the population at Rikers Island: A 2025 research paper from Scrutinize’s Oren and Chad Topaz found that the City’s Criminal Court judges who have law enforcement backgrounds, such as former prosecutors, are more likely to send people to jail and set higher bail amounts than other judges. 

“Replacing a single judge with law enforcement experience with one lacking law enforcement or legal service experience could, over a typical 10-year term, avert about 65 detentions, prevent 17 years of incarceration, and save an estimated $8.7 million in jail costs, along with roughly $6 million less in cash bail imposed,” Oren and his coauthor wrote. (Replacing a judge who was a former prosecutor with one with prior legal services experience, such as a former public defender, would also have a positive impact—according to the authors, “judges with legal services backgrounds are statistically indistinguishable from judges without law enforcement or legal services experience.”) 

Oren said the study’s findings indicate that—if one of Mamdani’s priorities is to close Rikers Island—Najmi’s committee would do well to diversify the bench in terms of the professional backgrounds of those it recommends for appointments. “It really depends on just how much of that you’re doing, and how fast this is going to kick in. But there is definitely a lesson here for a longer-term change to the jail population,” he said.

The population on Rikers has increased from 5,421 on March 12, 2020 (before the City began actively reducing the number of people held at the jail complex amid the COVID-19 pandemic) to almost 6,700 people as of May 1, 2026, and over the past two decades, the average length of stay in the City’s jails has increased from 44 days in 2001 to 104 days in 2023.

The jump in the jail population is in large part due to sluggish felony trial times “dramatically inflating New York City’s jail population,” according to a 2024 report by then-Comptroller Brad Lander. From 2019 to 2023, there was a 179 percent increase in the number of felony cases that took more than three years to process in New York City’s courts, he found. This is despite court workloads decreasing in recent years, according to court data on arrests, arraignments, and admissions. 

Lander’s report noted that it costs taxpayers about half a million dollars per year to detain one person on Rikers as they await their trial, and estimated that speeding up court processes could save the City up to $877 million per year.[5]

5. Lander’s report and reporting by Vital City highlight the critical role of State Supreme Court judges, OCA, as well as the NYPD and DA’s offices (particularly with complying with discovery reform), in reducing the size of the population at Rikers by working to speed up the timeline of criminal trials. According to a 2019 pilot in Brooklyn State Supreme Court, one solution is for State Supreme Court judges to use basic organizational techniques. The pilot—which had one judge do things like creating a written timeline and giving parties timely deadlines—saw a significant increase in the court’s percentage of felony cases disposed within six months.

At the time, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams also said more Criminal Court judges needed to be “steering eligible individuals into treatment and mental health courts, and prioritizing diversions like Supervised Release and Alternative to Incarceration programs.”

Indeed, finding—and appointing—people who would bring more creative thinking to the City’s Criminal Courts is one of the most frequent refrains of reformers. “We’ve seen diversion programs be very, very successful,” said Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York, one of the parties in the U.S. Supreme Court case challenging New York’s judicial nominating convention process. 

Lerner added, “Simply locking up large numbers of people has not really worked for our society. There have to be alternatives, but if your entire outlook is that the appropriate way to deal with somebody is to lock them up, then you are not going to be open to a more creative solution.”

When we asked Najmi what exactly his committee can do to help reduce the number of people held at Rikers, which will have to occur in order to close the jail facility, Najmi pointed to the need to keep the bench fully staffed, as well as the need to appoint people who aren’t locking New Yorkers up without considering alternatives to detention. “We want to make sure that we have judges that are going to consider all the facts that are relevant under the law [when] making a bail decision,” he said.

Raskin, the City Hall spokesperson, also said that MACJ evaluates and reviews judges’ bail decisions, and whether a judicial candidate is willing to consider alternatives to detention, along with other factors. 

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Transparency, when?

Then there’s Mayor Mamdani’s promise of transparency. Reformers are excited about the Mamdani administration’s commitment to maintain a website where the public can see the stages of the judicial evaluation process and the criteria the committee uses to assess candidates.

In March, Najmi told us he’d spent much of the first two months in his new job working to bring the committee’s website “into the 21st century,” creating an online application portal (which was still not live as of the first week of May 2026) for aspiring judges and providing information like when judges’ terms are up and whether they’re up for reappointment. Raskin told Hell Gate and Type Investigations that MACJ was still in the process of creating the portal, with the appropriate privacy and safety considerations. “A lot of advocates are people who are keeping track of the judges and their performance, and people want to know when somebody’s up for reappointment and when’s the appropriate time to submit something to the committee,” Najmi said. “So these kinds of basic transparency measures are really important.”

Still, there’s more to be done here, advocates said. A recent report published by Reinvent Albany and Scrutinize on practical steps the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on the Judiciary should take to reform New York City’s judicial system noted that the Mamdani administration had failed to adopt “several fundamental” recommendations. The report had recommended changing the structure of the committee to include members appointed by, for example, the comptroller or the public advocate, to increase independence. “The mayor is not devoid of politics, but you could help insulate from some of the politics by having a larger pool of members appointed by different branches of government,” said Reinvent Albany Senior Policy Advisor Rachael Fauss.

Raskin said that the committee is open to input on how to improve the process and that Najmi has been in conversation with the New York City Bar Association on a possible role for the group in assessing candidates.

The report also recommended that the committee not only create and publish a rubric for assessing candidates, but that it prepare a written report for each recommended candidate, detailing how the aspiring judge satisfies those criteria. If a candidate is appointed to the bench, their report should be made publicly available, the report stated. And if a judge is to be reappointed, they should be assessed with the same level of scrutiny as if they were applying for the first time, Fauss said.

“The public’s knowledge of the judicial system is extremely low because we don’t have information,” she said. “Even the candidates that are on the ballot as judges, there’s so little information about them. Here’s an opportunity to give as much information to the public about who is selected and why, and what the mayor’s powers are in this.” 

Fauss added, “We have given that power to the mayor…if we want to be able to evaluate [the administration] based on who they pick, we have to know who it is and why.”

Some level of confidentiality in the process, Raskin said, is necessary to attract a broader pool of judicial candidates, and to protect their privacy, but MACJ is also committed to expanding transparency in ways that build public trust.

Najmi told Hell Gate and Type Investigations in a follow-up email in March that, moving forward, his committee would look to appoint judges to New York City’s courts who were both qualified and fair.

“Judicial reappointments should be guided by fairness to litigants, strong judicial temperament, and a clear commitment to following and correctly applying the law,” he said. “In evaluating judges, the committee carefully considers feedback from attorneys who regularly appear in court—including public defenders and those serving indigent clients—because the outcome in these courts can transform a person’s life, their family, and their future.”

How can we go about reforming the process of how judges get onto the State Supreme Court bench? Read our next Case File.