Calls for the New York state Senate Judiciary Committee chair to step down are growing louder.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s after new court records reveal Democratic state Sen. Luis Sepulveda reported a judge on one of his housing cases to court administration.<\/p>\n
In a court document filed last month on June 16\u00a0in the matter of a property address registered at Hamilton Court in Manhattan versus Jose Diaz, the housing judge on the case, the Hon. Jason P. Vendzules, documents he\u2019s been made aware the respondent’s counsel has made a complaint about him to the court administration, and is recusing himself from the case to prevent \u201cany appearance of bias\u201d due to the complaint.<\/p>\n
\u201cEveryone knows the power he holds over the court system,\u201d said Peter Martin, the director of judicial accountability at the Center for Community Alternatives.<\/p>\n
Martin is now calling for Sepulveda to resign as chair of the Senate\u2019s Judiciary Committee, an appointment he received back in January.<\/p>\n
This incident happened just a month later in February after Sepulveda was a no-show for a scheduled court appearance in the case which deals with a claim of \u201cimproper termination.\u201d<\/p>\n
The hearing was rescheduled for March, but according to court documents, Sepulveda says he was unaware of the new court date.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s an inherent risk of conflict and abuses of power whenever the judiciary chair is actively practicing and Sen. Sepulveda\u2019s bad judgement in complaining about the housing judge to court administration officials crossed an obvious line that the chair should never cross,\u201d said Martin.<\/p>\n
This latest development comes after other court documents, including ones independently sourced by Spectrum News 1, show Sepulveda didn\u2019t show for some of his clients back in April of last year and in September.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe quality of Sen. Sepulveda\u2019s representation of his clients is not of particular interest to our organization, or of New Yorkers more broadly,\u201d said Martin. \u201cWhat is of interest is his actions as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and when he\u2019s appearing in court, in front of judges, representing clients that inherently reflects on him as chair of the committee.\u201d<\/p>\n
By phone, Sepulveda\u2019s campaign spokesperson, Mike Nieves, says \u201cthis is on the judge. Sen. Sepulveda maintains he did not file a complaint. To do so, he would have to go to the judicial misconduct board, and he did not.\u201d<\/p>\n
Martin says if Sepulveda doesn\u2019t resign, he\u2019s calling on Senate majority leadership to remove him as judiciary chair.<\/p>\n
Martin says the CCA has had \u201ccommunication with the Senate Democrat Majority, but not with Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins.”<\/p>\n
Martin tells Spectrum News 1 he\u2019s not at liberty to share what the communication was.<\/p>\n
Spectrum News 1 reached out to Senate majority leadership for comment for this story and did not immediately hear back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Calls for the New York state Senate Judiciary Committee chair to step down are growing louder. It\u2019s after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":289816,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[9,11,10,49,51,50,12,5304,112,87,856,200],"class_list":["post-289815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-new-york-state","tag-new-york-state-headlines","tag-new-york-state-news","tag-news","tag-nicole-neuman","tag-ny-state-of-politics","tag-politics","tag-state-senate","tag-vod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=289815"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289815\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/289816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=289815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=289815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=289815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}