Unqualified Yokels Subvert Judicial Process

Flipping through the NY Times this morning, I saw upstate NY was not-well represented with its front page article "In Tiny Courts of New York, Abuses of Law and Power" (link on the post title). In what appears to be a long-researched report, the Times found some shocking breaches of what we define as common judicial proceedings. Courts closed to the public, courts without transcripts of proceedings, courts whose training is a true-false test easier than the one for being a manicurist. My girlfriend's hometown of Malone has a place in the (presumably unwanted) spotlight:

A woman in Malone, N.Y., was not amused. A mother of four, she went to court in that North Country village seeking an order of protection against her husband, who the police said had choked her, kicked her in the stomach and threatened to kill her. The justice, Donald R. Roberts, a former state trooper with a high school diploma, not only refused, according to state officials, but later told the court clerk, “Every woman needs a good pounding every now and then.”

You think racism is just for George "Macacca" Allen and the rest of the south? Think again:

A black soldier charged in a bar fight near Fort Drum became alarmed when his accuser described him in court as “that colored man.” But the village justice, Charles A. Pennington, a boat hauler and a high school graduate, denied his objections and later convicted him. “You know,” the justice said, “I could understand if he would have called you a Negro, or he had called you a nigger.”

It's not just about breaches of basic human rights (because at this point in our history, we're just about ready to legalize torture anyway, so who cares?) It's also about millions of dollars that aren't accounted for:

The courts also handle money — more than $200 million a year in fines and fees. But the state comptroller’s office, which once conducted scores of justice-court audits every year, now does only a handful. When it looked most recently, auditing a dozen courts in May, it reported serious financial-management problems and estimated that millions of dollars a year might be missing from the justice courts statewide.

Let's hope that this article starts a conversation about revising New York's judicial system.