Watchdog group seeks to force four New York Supreme Court justices into retirement for legal errors

A New York-based nonprofit dedicated to advocating for alternatives to incarceration is lobbying to force four state Supreme Court justices into retirement.

The Center for Community Alternatives (CCA) flagged four justices in the recertification process judges must undertake after to keep their posts after they turn 70. The group urged the Office of Court Administration’s (OCA) Administrative Board to deny the certification requests of state Supreme Court Justices Mario F. Mattei, Timothy P. Mazzei, Thomas E. Moran, and Laura A. Ward.

By state law, all Supreme Court judges have to retire at 70, but they can continue serving on the bench in two-year intervals up to age 76 with the approval of the Administrative Board of the Courts through a process that assesses their mental capacity and need for their services.

The CCA argued, however, that recertification “is not a right,” but rather should only be granted based on a rigorous assessment of a judge’s integrity, impartiality, and legal acumen to a high standard. To that end, it compiled an extensive report targeting these four judges that identified patterns of constitutional violations, legal errors, and excessive sentences that, the organization argues, should fail to meet New York’s recertification standards.

“As our review makes clear, Justices Mario Mattei, Timothy Mazzei, Thomas Moran, and Laura Ward each have records that demonstrate they are unfit to serve any more time on the bench,” CCA’s Director of Judicial Accountability Peter Martin said in a statement. “The court system must deny their requests for certification and take advantage of this opportunity to advance the integrity of New York’s courts.”

None of the judges responded to a request for comment on the findings of the report.

To make their case, the CCA looked into the number of reversals that appellate courts made to the four justices’ decisions as a reflection of legal judgment and competence. The legal grounds they focused on included unlawful or excessive sentences, reversals of evidence suppression, and errors undermining jury integrity. In many cases, the report looked not just at recent decisions but also at some spanning multiple decades of the judges’ careers.

Last year, the group made a similar case against the recertification, which targeted one judge, Queens Supreme Court Justice Michael Aloise. Despite the push, Aloise was re-certified and allowed to continue serving on the bench.

In the case of Staten Island Justice Mattei, the CCA was focused on excessive sentences that an appellate court later overturned.

Appellate courts reduced the sentences that Mattei imposed on four cases. In all cases, the appellate court found that it was either a mistake or unduly harsh to make sentences for different charges consecutive instead of concurrent, adding years to the prison stay. In two of them, the appellate court identified legal errors that prolonged the sentences.

The group attacked Mattei’s record for giving prosecutors an unfair advantage. The report identifies four cases where appellate courts reversed Mattei’s decisions because he allowed prosecutions to proceed on criminal complaints that did not adequately support the charges.

In the case of Suffolk County Justice Mazzei, the CCA also cited 15 sentences the judge imposed that were overturned or modified on appeal as excessive.

“An extraordinary rate of such reversals and a telling red flag,” wrote the authors of the report. 

Appellate courts have reversed Mazzei’s decision twice and modified his judgments 13 other times. In one grand larceny case from 2002 that the report highlighted as particularly egregious, an appellate court vacated Mazzei’s sentence because it found that he had “improperly speculated” that the defendant had committed other crimes that she was not being charged with, and transferred the case to another judge.

For Monroe County Justice Moran, the report focused on the high number of cases that appellate courts have overturned. The report found that 27 decisions had been reversed, seven modified and eight remitted to another court. The reversals involve a variety of areas of adjudication, but the authors of the report concluded that overall, they showed an unfair bias for law enforcement. 

CCA cited a case in which the Appellate Division reversed a conviction after finding that Moran had retained a juror who openly acknowledged she would not be fair and impartial and would rule in favor of the police. The group also cited six cases in which an appellate court had reversed decisions he made on whether evidence should be kept out of trial because police violated a person’s constitutional rights.

In the record of Manhattan Justice Ward, the authors of the report found a combination of almost all the types of issues they flagged in the other three judges: evidence suppression issues, excessive sentences and mistakes related to pleas and charging documents.

Over a span of 15 years, appellate courts overturned 42 of her cases, including 13 reversals, 26 modifications and three remittals. It identified eight cases in which an appellate court found that Ward had imposed sentences that were excessive enough to merit a reduction.