For years, leaders of the reform-minded political club New Kings Democrats have been working to elect Brooklyn district leaders who are willing to wrest power from the establishment—including when it comes to the Brooklyn Democratic Party’s judicial nominees. 

“There’s so much that both lawyers and judges do to curry favor with the Democratic Party and with Democratic Party leaders, and that winds up harming regular people who are not connected to that structure,” Tony Melone, the president of the New Kings Democrats, told Hell Gate and Type Investigations. 

In recent years, the political club has made some significant headway: 15 current district leaders were endorsed by the New Kings Democrats, said Melone. This year, the group is hoping to finally elect enough district leaders to make up a majority of the county party’s executive committee and overthrow the old guard, including current party boss Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn. “That’s when things could really start to change, because a majority of district leaders can elect a new party chair,” he said. 

Bichotte Hermelyn and the Brooklyn Democratic Party did not respond to questions from Hell Gate and Type Investigations.

Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York, agreed that the Brooklyn Democratic Party was a prime example of the need for reform. “I am struck by the continuing scandal coming out of the Brooklyn Civil and Supreme Courts that does not serve the community in any way, shape, or form,” Lerner said, referring to recent allegations linking a disgraced former State Supreme Court justice, former Brooklyn Democratic Party chair Frank Seddio, and alleged fraud. 

Few reformers, however, suggest blowing up county parties’ role in hand-picking judges. Rather, party reformers are continuing to work within the existing structure. Melone said that with a new chair and a majority of district leaders, the party could begin to build a more transparent and democratic system of nominating judicial candidates. “Our theory of change is, we get better district leaders in who care about this stuff and who want to build a better party,” he said. “And then, even though it’s still this convoluted system for choosing judges, the people who are going to be sitting around that table are going to be organizers.”

Carmella Charrington and Omar Hardy are two new candidates vying for district leader positions in Brooklyn’s Assembly District 56, which covers Bed-Stuy, this year. Both are members of the People’s Coalition to Stop Deed Theft who are running with the support of Melone and the New Kings Democrats. Charrington said she wants to help elect judges who are much better prepared to deal with complex cases like her own, given that these judges are one of the first lines of defense for homeowners who suspect they might be victims of deed theft. “Once you find out what the district leader does, it’s like, ‘I need to be there,'” she said, adding, “I think there are judges that are there and available who really want to help. We just have to put them in place.”

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Reforming the county parties, from the inside and the outside

Mark Hanna, a member of the New Kings Democrats, first ran to become a district leader in Bay Ridge in 2022 and won. He has already partnered with other NKD-affiliated district leaders to develop a rubric to evaluate judges who are vying to be endorsed for a State Supreme Court seat by the Brooklyn Dems, which includes looking at their qualifications, such as their past decisions and demeanor. “I am trying to just mitigate this from being disastrous by ensuring that at the very least, the district leaders that are putting the slate of judges to the judicial delegates, have information,” he said.[1] With a reform-minded chair, he said, this could be standardized. 

1. As we wrote about here, elected judicial delegates are technically the ones who are supposed to nominate State Supreme Court candidates for their county political party. But in reality, it’s the party leaders—its district leaders—who make the call.

In Queens, reform-minded activists are also coming for the old guard in the borough’s Democratic Party—but from the outside. Over the past decade, young progressives in western Queens have been growing in number, with left-leaning candidates in the so-called “Commie Corridor” siphoning power away from the establishment.

Queens progressives have all but decided that challenging the county party’s power over State Supreme Court nominations just isn’t worth the time and effort, according to former Queens Democratic Party district leader and Democratic Socialists of America member Émilia Decaudin. (Decaudin also ran for State Assembly in 2023 before stepping down when NYC-DSA endorsed Claire Valdez.) The Queens Democratic Party did not respond to a request for comment.

Instead, Decaudin said, progressives in the borough have largely decided to amass power by electing their candidates into higher office (see, for example, Mayor Zohran Mamdani), or by supporting independent candidates in Civil Court judge races, given that those candidates just need to get petition signatures to run in the primary, rather than woo country party bosses. They’ve had some limited success: Former public defender Juliette-Noor Haji won her 2025 primary race for Queens Civil Court in a landslide, and then went on to win in the general, with an endorsement from Mamdani and support from other progressive party members, despite the party machine backing a different candidate, Thomas Wright-Fernandez. 

“All of a sudden, [progressives] have control over the appointed judges. What that means is, we’ll now have good judges in Criminal Court overseeing arraignments, and better judges in Civil Court and Family Court,” Decaudin said, referring to Mayor Mamdani’s role in appointing judges. “And that’s a bench of people that could be appointed to the Supreme Courts as acting Supreme Court judges. It’s kind of just one big bucket, because judges are so commonly reassigned from one court to another.” 

The Manhattan Democrats’ system of selecting judges is a bit more rigorous than that of its counterparts in Brooklyn and Queens. “What I’ve been told is that, in Brooklyn, the judicial elections landscape is just kind of a wild west,” said E.E. Keenan, an attorney and former head of the judicial committee for the Downtown Independent Democrats, a Manhattan Democratic political club. “I think in Manhattan, we really have a strong bench that’s getting even stronger year by year.” Rather than leave decisions up to the party leaders, every judge up for a State Supreme Court seat in Manhattan is assessed by an independent panel of representatives from legal associations who assess their fitness, character, ethics, and record, Keenan explained. Traditionally, judicial delegates will only consider candidates who have been approved twice by this panel.

But in Manhattan, the judicial selection and nomination process is not immune to patronage politics. Aspiring judges still often donate to the county party, for one. Keenan pointed out that those aspiring judges also are all but required to hire consultants to manage their campaigns, which can be prohibitively expensive for some. This limits the pool of interested parties, he said: “Not all good people can afford a consultant.” The Manhattan Democratic Party did not respond to a request for comment.

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State-level reforms

While many judges are elected by voters, a large number of sitting judges on New York City’s State Supreme Court bench aren’t actually elected at all, but rather are appointed to the position from lower courts, such as the City’s Criminal Courts, by the state’s Office of Court Administration.[2]

2. In fact, three of the judges profiled in Hell Gate and Type Investigations’s Courts of Contempt reached the State Supreme Court bench this way, including Judge John Hecht, Judge Dale Fong-Frederick, and Judge Althea Drysdale.

These appointments occur because there simply aren’t enough judges to do the work required to guarantee the right to a speedy trial. This is because the state constitution caps the number of judges who can formally sit on the State Supreme Court bench to one judge per 50,000 residents, or about 171 elected judges in New York City’s State Supreme Courts. OCA gets around this cap by appointing judges from the lower courts to State Supreme Court seats statewide. And while the appointments are meant to be temporary, many judges elevated in this way remain in their positions for a decade or more. 

According to a 2024 report from the New York City Bar Association, about 50 percent of New York’s State Supreme Court judges were shifted by OCA from lower courts—with no one outside of OCA having any insight into why those judges were elevated. “It’s a wonderful shell game,” said Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York. “You get elected to one court and then you are selected as an acting member of another and you rise through the ranks.” A Scrutinize and Reinvent Albany data analysis found that, once appointed, 97 percent of judges remain on the State Supreme Court bench. 

OCA did not answer questions from Hell Gate and Type Investigations about its process of appointing judges to the State Supreme Court bench.

Once a judge is on the bench, there are very few options to get rid of them, said Peter Martin, director of judicial accountability at the Center for Community Alternatives. While the state Commission on Judicial Conduct, the agency that reviews complaints of ethical misconduct against New York judges, has the legal authority to remove judges for cause before the end of their terms, it has rarely used it, he said. “And so lots of judges who have done or said truly horrifying things have been allowed to remain on the bench,” Martin said. 

The commission’s public records show it has removed only four New York City State Supreme Court judges since 1979, including one acting State Supreme Court judge who was fired in 1997 for passing a note about an intern to his court attorney that read, “She has some knockers – look at those nipples sticking out.” In 2003, the commission added a veil of secrecy to the process when it began allowing judges facing an ethical misconduct complaint to resign without going through a public removal process, as long as they promise they’ll never be a judge again.

Eight New York City State Supreme Court judges have left the bench this way since then (four from Brooklyn), and in 2025, 28 judges statewide resigned while complaints against them were pending before the commission. 

The commission’s workload has grown in recent years. It received 3,363 complaints in 2025—a record number—and from those complaints, it started 141 full-fledged investigations. (The commission reviews every complaint and votes on whether to open an investigation.) According to Reinvent Albany’s senior policy advisor Rachael Fauss, the commission is underresourced. Reinvent Albany, Fauss said, supports legislation that would both help boost funding for the commission and allow it to investigate judges who resign or retire while under investigation. The commission’s administrator and counsel, Robert H. Tembeckjian, told us, “The Commission on Judicial Conduct has been funded at an appropriate level for several years now. Our current request for an appropriation of $9.3 million has been publicly supported by the governor and both houses of the legislature.”

Still, the bigger question remains: What can be done to bring more accountability to every step of the judicial selection process, and to ensure that judges get on the bench due to merit and not political patronage?

Even almost two decades out from the U.S. Supreme Court decision where Justice John Paul Stevens deemed New York’s judicial selection process “stupid,” there is still no strong movement to reform the system. This, Common Cause’s Lerner explained, is because there is still no consensus on the ideal replacement. 

“In any other state that had a more functional representational democracy, the legislature would have been embarrassed by that quote and would have changed the system in some way,” she said, referring to Justice Stevens’s choice of words. “But this is New York, and so 20 years down the line, we’re now faced with the system basically being unchanged, and where what you need to get on the bench is to be a party faithful who, in most instances, has waited their turn in line, and has curried favor with the county chair, and is the nominee of the county chair.”

The debate about the ideal judicial selection system generally falls along the spectrum from those who want judges to run in elections and campaign, to those who want expert panels to appoint the judges—whether that be from within county parties, or the mayor’s and governor’s offices. Lerner compared New York’s system to California’s system, where judicial elections have been recently described as “bare-knuckles brawls between an incumbent backed by the legal community and outside forces accusing the judge of being soft on crime or corrupt,” as an example of this dichotomy. California, she said, has “too much democracy,” whereas in New York, there’s “not enough.” Research suggests the prospect of “tough on crime” electoral challenges makes some judges issue harsher sentences the closer they get to Election Day. 

The ideal solution likely sits somewhere between the two poles—requiring both more public input and education, and more independent experts assessing the potential judges. Requiring that all judges pass scrutiny through the City’s bar associations—whether they are being appointed by the mayor, or backed by a county party—is one solution, Lerner said.

“While we work to change the convention system to a more open and responsive process for nominating judicial candidates, we need to have much more information about the people who are making it through the current corrupted system,” Common Cause’s Lerner said. “I don’t want to make it seem like we don’t get highly capable people on the bench. Sometimes we do, but it’s not because the process is seeking them out.”

Transparency is key: Lerner said she’d also like to see all judges or potential judges be required to publish a public personal statement, a disclosure of their experience and philosophy toward judging. Legislation requiring this could be introduced in the state legislature, and the idea could help influence the selection process of the county parties, she said.  

“This puts more information and power in the hands of the voters, and that is my prejudice. I am a pro-voter advocate, and so I would start with, let’s provide more information about who these people are, and that might influence the selection process.” 

Then there’s the issue of the many judges who are appointed by OCA to be on the State Supreme Court bench with little to no oversight from the public, bar associations, or City or state government.

One solution to this, advocates say, would be to change the state constitution to increase the cap on elected State Supreme Court judges, legislation the New York City Bar Association has lobbied to pass for years. Passing the Uncap Justice Act would fix the issue of judges being elevated to the State Supreme Court bench via the backdoor, reformists say. “The only durable solution is constitutional reform,” Reinvent Albany and Scrutinize wrote in a recent joint report on the issue. The bill passed in 2024, and it would need to pass again this year, to meet the requirements of changing the state constitution. The Uncap Justice Act’s primary sponsors were Brad Hoylman-Sigal, who is now Manhattan borough president, and Alex Bores, who is running for Congress, leaving its future uncertain. As of April 24, the Uncap Justice Act still did not have a State Senate sponsor to replace Hoylman-Sigal, though Bores’s office told Hell Gate the assemblymember was still hopeful the bill would be read this year, as it is a priority piece of legislation for him. 

In the meantime, advocates are recommending that OCA make its appointment process transparent, with publicly available information on who is making the decisions, how they were made, and by publishing annual reports on which judges were appointed or reappointed to the bench. OCA did not respond to a request for comment.

Scrutinize’s Oded Oren told Hell Gate and Type Investigations that he was optimistic about change coming from within the courts after the 2023 appointment of Rowan Wilson to chief judge (Wilson appointed current Chief Administrative Judge Joseph A. Zayas, who has endorsed the legislation to scrap the cap on State Supreme Court judges). Wilson has drawn complaints from Republicans for being outspoken about his views on criminal justice reform, and even recently encouraged New Yorkers to learn more about judicial races and vote out bad judges. “We hope that the chief judge will take positions that would, in the long term, make the court system better and fairer and more open,” Oren said.