In 2008, the Supreme Court of the United States had a chance to finally clean up the cesspool of patronage and favor-trading that was New York’s judicial selection process. Several years prior, Margarita López Torres, a Civil Court judge in Brooklyn, had been the public face of a lawsuit against the state Board of Elections over its judicial selection procedures, alleging she was blackballed from a State Supreme Court nomination by Brooklyn Democratic Party leaders after she had refused to hire the party boss’s pick as her top aide and another leader’s daughter as a law clerk. 

State Supreme Court judicial candidates who must run for election (versus those that are appointed by the Office of Court Administration) are generally handpicked by party bosses and rubber-stamped by judicial delegates long before voters see their names on the ballot. By running a judicial nomination system that gives party bosses so much power, López Torres’s suit argued, the state was depriving New Yorkers of a meaningful voice in judicial elections. “The whole process is a sham,” the New York Times concluded in an editorial about López Torres’s case. “It has the trappings of democracy, but it is not democratic at all.”

López Torres won in federal district court, where the judge ordered judicial nominees to be selected by a direct primary election until the state legislature could enact a new electoral procedure. The state appealed, and she won again. But the Supreme Court saw things differently. It wasn’t the state that had created this rigged system, the court concluded, it was the local party, and there wasn’t much the court could do about that.

“Party conventions, with their attendant ‘smoke-filled rooms,’ and domination by party leaders, have long been an accepted manner of selecting party candidates,” the court’s majority wrote in its decision. Justice John Paul Stevens, in his concurrence with the decision, stressed that while the court was saying Brooklyn’s process wasn’t unconstitutional, it certainly wasn’t saying it was good. “The Constitution does not prohibit legislatures from enacting stupid laws,” Stevens wrote. 

Nearly 20 years later, the system challenged by López Torres[1] persists across the state, substantially unchanged.

1. Thwarted in her quest for a State Supreme Court seat, López Torres ran for a Surrogate’s Court judge seat in 2005, beating the party’s preferred candidate. She won reelection in 2019, this time with the support of the county party, and she retired two years later.

The process has proven stubbornly resistant to even modest reform. Short of a convention-floor rebellion or a massive, coordinated organizing effort to elect truly independent judicial delegates or district leaders, the status quo remains. 

So how does an aspiring judge gain a foothold under this status quo? And, once on the bench, what might they owe the bosses for their support?

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The path to the bench still often runs through the county party

That determinative meeting before the official meeting that we wrote about here? That’s the culmination of months, and sometimes years, of the potential State Supreme Court judicial nominees lining up their support with party leaders. 

Sometimes that schmoozing is innocuous, if not necessarily the kind of meritocratic screening one might hope for people who will hold the fate of New Yorkers in their hands. Former district leader Dana Rachlin recalled the first time she met with a candidate for State Supreme Court. Everyone was treating it like “dating,” she recalled. One candidate brought her homemade bread, she said. “And I was like, ‘You misunderstood who I am. I have some questions about bail reform,'” she said. “The encounters were maybe meaningful in some ways, but they failed to answer the important question of, what kind of judge are they going to be?”

Other times, it involves going out to dinner. One district leader, who requested anonymity to protect relationships with judicial candidates, said some district leaders have been accused of “having full course meals with wine and alcohol on the judge’s dime.” “Some judges feel pressure to do that, because they feel like if they don’t, then they’re not going to get the favor of the [district] leader,” they added.

State judicial conduct rules forbid sitting judges from donating to political parties or candidates. Once a judge has formally declared they are running to be on the bench, however, there is a loophole. The rules permit judicial candidates to purchase up to two tickets for fundraising dinners, provided the tickets don’t cost more than $250 apiece. The result, people familiar with the party process say, is that district leaders hold fundraisers[2] where the tickets are priced exactly at the legal limit, and it’s not uncommon to find 10 or 20 judicial candidates—often with a plus-one—in attendance. Indeed, a 2020 investigation by New York Focus found that of 24 judges elected to State Supreme Court seats in New York City in that year’s election, 20 had donated to county party organizations or their leaders—some of them to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars, and typically given in $250 increments.

2. District leaders play an important role, collectively constituting the county party leadership. Some of them also hold elected office in state or City government, but most don’t, and compared to other elected positions, district leaders typically don’t command much attention from donors, often pulling in a few tens of thousands of dollars a year, according to campaign finance records. Given this, a parade of judicial hopefuls buying tickets to their fundraisers can make a real difference to the war chest they use to campaign for reelection and help political allies.

“The fact that judicial candidates are basically required to do this circuit, that’s money in the district leaders’ campaign accounts,” said one former judicial candidate from Brooklyn who has attended these fundraisers, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to preserve their relationship with the Brooklyn Democratic Party. “You go to some of these fundraisers, and it seems like most of the attendees are trying to be judges.”

Campaign disclosures for the nine candidates who received the Brooklyn Democrats’ endorsement for State Supreme Court seats in 2025 vary widely. Some filed no paperwork at all, or claimed they spent less than $50. At the other end of the spectrum, Brian Gotlieb, elected as a State Supreme Court judge sitting in Brooklyn in 2025, spent more than $200,000 from his campaign committee in 2024 and 2025. Among those expenditures: more than $20,000 in donations to the Brooklyn Democratic Party, local Democratic clubs, and campaign accounts associated with Democratic leaders. Gotlieb did not respond to questions about these expenditures, which we sent him via OCA.

There are other ways to win over party leaders. Judicial candidates often hire a political consultant[3] to shepherd their candidacy to a nomination. Consultant’s bills for these campaigns routinely come in over $20,000 for a single run, and some candidates spend $50,000 or even close to $150,000 on consultants, according to campaign finance records. 

3. Over in the Manhattan Democratic Party, potential State Supreme Court judges also hire consultants to manage their campaigns. E.E. Keenan, an attorney and former Downtown Independent Democrats judicial committee chair, told Hell Gate and Type Investigations he is concerned that the cost involved keeps some people who would be good judges from throwing their hats in the ring. “Unless they’re going out of pocket from their public servant salary, they have to fundraise. They have to fundraise from lawyers, they have to fundraise from family, or they have to be independently wealthy. And all of those things obviously come with the same problems that come with politicians being reliant on fundraising,” he said. “Not all good people can afford a consultant,” he added.

Not all consultants are created equal, however. The former Brooklyn judicial candidate told Hell Gate and Type Investigations that they were “told by multiple people that if I got an endorsement, I would be expected to hire a particular consultant.”[4]

4. In the Bronx, a 2024 New York Focus investigation found that 85 percent of Civil Court candidates who had won their elections since 2021 hired at least one of two consulting firms run by “close allies” of the Bronx Democratic Party boss, State Senator Jamaal Bailey, collectively paying those firms over $172,000. Bailey told New York Focus that the party’s endorsements “are based on a thorough and fair evaluation by a judicial screening panel composed of representatives from diverse bar associations and community organizations across the city. We also value input from our district leaders and members, ensuring a broad and inclusive perspective in our decision-making.”

At the Brooklyn Dems’ nominating convention in 2025, State Supreme Court nominee Norma Jennings thanked the delegates for their endorsement, with a special shout-out to her consultant, Gregorio Mayers, whom she called the “Supreme-maker.” Mayers, who consulted for four of the nine endorsed judges, was in attendance, and told Hell Gate and Type Investigations that his work consisted of advising his candidates on interviews, events, and campaigning. That work netted him $168,500 in fees from clients in the 2025 cycle, according to campaign finance records.

This expensive, insider-dominated process limits who is even willing to run for a seat, according to Mark Hanna, a district leader for Bay Ridge. Typical campaigns for contested Civil Court positions spend between $80,000 and $200,000, with the most well-resourced among them spending as much as $300,000, Hanna said. Campaigns for State Supreme Court seats are generally less expensive, because they don’t involve petitioning—the only people whose support must be mustered are district leaders. Most judicial candidates largely self-fund their campaigns, Hanna said, which restricts the field of candidates to people with pockets deep enough to pay the price of admission.

Everyone familiar with the process stressed to Hell Gate and Type Investigations that good, qualified candidates for both Civil Court and State Supreme Court do make it through this process and find their way on to the bench.[5] The problem, many of them say, is that less qualified candidates do too. 

5. Errol Louis makes a similar point in New York Magazine.

“When I come into the meeting with my slate of candidates, I have to persuade other district leaders, who have their own preferred candidates, some for good reasons, some for favoritism because they know the right people, and so there’s compromise,” Hanna said. “It ends up being kind of perverse. We’re not always picking the top candidates.”

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Then the real fun begins

Once on the bench, judges who owe their position to the party are often in a position to pay their patrons back. Judges have historically doled out lucrative fiduciary appointments to party-affiliated lawyers and ruled on motions brought by attorneys who happened to also be influential party bigwigs.

A 2000 New York Post investigation found judges across the city assigning hundreds of thousands of dollars in fiduciary appointments[6] to lawyers who were either powerful politicians in their own right or closely associated with local party leadership. The year before, two attorneys connected to the Brooklyn Democratic Party set it down on paper, writing a letter to party leaders complaining that they’d been cut out of that patronage scheme, according to reporting in the Daily News. 

6. Judges—especially in Surrogate’s Court but also elsewhere—are sometimes called upon to assign law firms to serve as administrators, executors, trustees and guardians of estates, roles that can be worth tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees.

Today, the favor trading appears to continue. In 2025, the New York Post reported on the alleged messy entanglements of Lawrence Knipel, a former Brooklyn administrative judge with decades of experience on the bench. The Post reported Knipel had used his position to bestow nearly a thousand fiduciary appointments—some of them worth tens of thousands of dollars—to a couple dozen lawyers and firms. 

Those lawyers and firms had donated a total of $25,000, not to Knipel (that would be barred by ethics rules), but to Knipel’s wife, Lori Knipel, a former long-time district leader of the Brooklyn Dems. Knipel, for his part, denied any wrongdoing. The Post story came out shortly before Knipel’s scheduled retirement, and according to the paper, “any possible investigation by the State Commission on Judicial Conduct[7] wouldn’t be able to reach any conclusive findings prior to the agency losing jurisdiction.” Both Lawrence and Lori Knipel did not return a request for comment. 

7. The New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct is an independent agency created in 1978 and composed of 11 members as well as staff. In 2025, the commission received 3,363 complaints, and conducted 330 investigations, which included investigations carried over from the previous year. Of those complaints, 43 of them, involving 23 different judges, authorized formal charges against the judges.

Rachlin, the former district leader, said one of the things she looked for when interviewing judicial candidates was the courage to do the right thing—to follow the law and rise above influence. She asked each candidate the same question, which might seem like a softball: What would the candidate do if, as a State Supreme Court judge, they got a call from someone in a position of power asking for a favor on a case before them? One candidate, she recalled, was stumped by the question. “They were like, ‘I don’t know what I would do, I just don’t know,'” Rachlin said. “I was stunned.”

Another recent ethical faceplant involves Edward Harold King, who was appointed by OCA[8] to State Supreme Court in 2024 after winning a Civil Court judgeship in Brooklyn. King resigned at the end of 2025 after he was sued in State Supreme Court by investors, ending an investigation into his financial activities by the Commission on Judicial Conduct. According to allegations made in lawsuits, King contributed to a scheme to defraud real estate and business investors by acting as an escrow agent—already a big no-no for sitting judges, who are generally barred from acting as fiduciaries or taking part in business operations—and then simply refusing to return escrow funds to the people to whom they were owed. King publicly denied the allegations; he did not return a request for comment.  

8. Judges are shifted around courts by OCA depending on vacancies and need. Because state law caps the number of State Supreme Court judges and there are frequently judicial shortages, OCA often elevates other judges to the State Supreme Court bench.

King hadn’t actually run a campaign when he first became a Civil Court judge. He didn’t have to. The position had opened up when a county party-backed incumbent who had already won the primary with the party’s endorsement was moved up to State Supreme Court before the general election, leaving a late-breaking vacancy on the ballot. As a result, the backfill appointment was effectively up to Brooklyn Democratic Party leadership. The major Black power blocs within the party supported King over the other potential candidate, who was Puerto Rican, but King may have had another advantage: Already in his late sixties, he had a few short years before court rules would require him to resign.[9]

9. New York state law requires judges to retire at age 70—though State Supreme Court judges can apply for up to three two-year extensions after that.

The party doesn’t hesitate to elevate judges to State Supreme Court “who are, like, 68 years old, because it means the vacancy is going to come up again soon, and they can do the whole thing again,” said the former judicial candidate, who has observed the Brooklyn Dems’ selection process for years.

The Brooklyn Democrats did not respond to a request for comment.

King’s resignation attracted attention not only because of the corruption allegations against him but because he was represented in more than one lawsuit by none other than Brooklyn Democratic Party power broker Frank Seddio.

Seddio, a former state assemblymember, was himself briefly a judge in Brooklyn Surrogate’s Court, resigning in 2007 after only 17 months into a 14-year term, as he was in the midst of an ethics investigation by the Commission on Judicial Conduct into allegations he’d improperly given tens of thousands of dollars from his campaign funds to party leaders whose support he needed to become a judge. Seddio described those donations as “mistakes,” and said that the money had been returned. As a well-connected district leader and the head of the influential Thomas Jefferson Democratic Club, and then as head of the Brooklyn Democratic Party from 2012 to 2020, Seddio has been widely regarded as a judicial kingmaker for more than a decade. In an interview from 2024, he boasted of being “a part of selecting at least, maybe, 60 Supreme Court judges.”

One lawsuit against King alleged that he was working with a Brooklyn businessman named Yechiel “Sam” Sprei and his associates to steal escrow money from potential investors in Sprei’s business deals. 

Sprei has also been accused of improper financial dealings in other lawsuits filed in State Supreme Court, and in several of them, Sprei has been represented by Seddio. 

Seddio’s involvement in the suits, especially those in Brooklyn courts, highlights a murky question: How can anyone be sure that when a party bigwig like Seddio appears as an attorney before judges he’s helped to put on the bench, that that relationship doesn’t tilt the scales of justice?

One case involving Seddio has tested that very question. Seddio is representing plaintiffs in a lawsuit against a pair of international investors in Brooklyn State Supreme Court—an action the investors characterized as an attempt to stop the two from getting back money they’d placed with an escrow agent as part of a potential business opportunity with Sprei.

Four separate Brooklyn State Supreme Court judges have recused themselves from the case, after parties working with Seddio—and Seddio himself—hired attorneys that created conflicts for the judges. One judge recused himself after Seddio said he was engaging a law firm who was representing the same judge “in unrelated litigation.” More than a year after they first began trying to get their money, the two investors have gotten nowhere. 

In November 2025, the investors filed suit in federal court, accusing Seddio of using his influence with Brooklyn courts to stymie their efforts to find justice there. Seddio previously called the plaintiffs’ claims in that case “offensive.”[10] In the course of the ongoing state lawsuit, it was revealed that Seddio had called the State Supreme Court judge on the case on his personal cell phone, outside of permissible communication channels. In a January hearing, the judge presiding over the case said that Seddio had told him at a summer Brooklyn Bar Association dinner that he was pleased with the judge’s court attorney and was thinking of taking steps to help elevate her to a higher position. Speaking from the bench, the judge went on to say that Seddio had also called him to follow up on the court attorney’s promotion, shortly before the judge was assigned to the case in question. 

10. As of early May 2026, sanctions against Seddio for alleged frivolous litigation are pending in Brooklyn State Supreme Court. In federal court, where he’s accused of abusing the legal process and engaging in deceit and collusion, he’s fighting to block a subpoena for his bank records. Read more about these accusations in Hell Gate’s coverage.

Court testimony and evidence shows that the escrow agent entrusted with the investors’ money was hoping to convince the court that he still had it (he did not) by means of a $2 million check from King, the then-sitting State Supreme Court judge, but was thwarted in this hope because King’s bank had frozen his accounts and the check was uncashable. Meanwhile, photographs show Sprei, the alleged fraudster appearing before Brooklyn judges, mingling with party leadership at the 2025 convention where judges are nominated. Sprei did not respond to a request for comment.

Seddio handed over the leadership of the county party in 2020, but he retains an outsized influence on who ultimately becomes a judge in Brooklyn. Seddio did not respond to a request for comment.

What accounts for this ongoing influence? Some party insiders point to his reputation for being aggressive and pugnacious. (One example—in 2022, after the closed meeting where party leaders preselected the year’s crop of State Supreme Court nominees, Seddio became enraged at another leader, erupting into a tirade that was caught on video. “What I am is a fucking Sicilian who will take your fucking heart out,” Seddio bellowed at the district leader. “You should only suffer a terrible death!”) 

The question facing New Yorkers now is how to enact further reforms that might finally drag the judicial selection process out of the “smoke-filled rooms” shrugged at by the U.S. Supreme Court in its 2008 decision.

You can read more about ongoing efforts to reform the State Supreme Court judicial selection process here. But before that, read our next Case File, on what the mayor can do to change how people become judges in New York City.