\u201cA full-time judge is prohibited from practicing law,\u201d said Commission Administrator Robert Tembeckjian. \u201cThat Judge Kasper continued to do so for two years after taking the bench was bad enough.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat he also facilitated a felon\u2019s masquerade as a lawyer is even more shocking,\u201d he added. \u201cSuch contempt for the rule of law is inimical to the role of a judge and requires his removal from office.\u201d<\/p>\n
Richard Emery, Kasper\u2019s lawyer, admitted his client \u201cdid commit misconduct\u201d but maintained it was nothing that should have led to removal.\u00a0<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/richard_emery.0.jpg\")
Judge Kasper\u2019s attorney, Richard Emery, pictured in 2020, said he would appeal the commission\u2019s ruling. Credit: Ben Fractenberg\/DNAinfo<\/p>\n
\u201cHe did not benefit in any way himself, and nothing about his misconduct relates to his actions on the bench,\u201d Emery told The City Reporter.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He acknowledged that Kasper continued some private practice cases at his old law office before getting elected to the bench in 2022. Full-time judges in New York are barred from practicing law, according to Office of Court Administration regulations.<\/p>\n
In one case, Kasper told a former client that she had to pay him $1,000 in cash before he would complete her divorce, according to the commission\u2019s 69-page report<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Emery said he continued doing the work as a misguided loyalty to his clients.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe irony here is that his practice of law, while he was a full-time judge, was based solely on his personal commitment to his former clients and his loyalty to them to wind up their matters as cheaply as possible, so that they would not be affected by his election to the bench,\u201d Emery contended.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Lawyer Who Wasn\u2019t<\/p>\n As for the unlicensed lawyer, Kasper let his longtime friend and paralegal, Janice Bar, to file at least 22 legal documents under his name, according to the commission.\u00a0<\/p>\n In one particularly egregious allegation of misconduct, Bar pretended to be an attorney in open court, examined a witness, and signed court documents as \u201cJanice Bar, Esq,\u201d according to the commission. When she told Kasper about it afterward, he reportedly just said, \u201cIt\u2019s a good thing you were there,\u201d and did nothing, the commission report said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Kasper and Bar have been friends for years and in the 1990s they served as Republican Party<\/a> co-district leaders, where she repeatedly supported his campaigns for the bench.\u00a0<\/p>\n In 2016, she was convicted of two felonies: forgery and making an apparently sworn false statement.\u00a0<\/p>\n Emery, who previously served on the commission for 13 years, argued that the allegations against her did not directly involve Kasper.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThat was not his misconduct; that was her misconduct.,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd if anything, to the extent that he enabled it, it was as a lawyer, not as a judge.\u201d<\/p>\n The commission also said Kasper left roughly $17,200 sitting in his attorney escrow accounts for over two years after taking the bench. As of 2024 he still couldn\u2019t account for over $7,000 of it, according to the commission.\u00a0<\/p>\n Kasper spent years running for the judicial position in Queens before he beat Democrat Paul Vallone, a former City Council<\/a> member and a son of Peter Vallone, who served as Council speaker during the 1990s. It was the first time in nearly 60 years that a Republican won that seat, according to City Limits<\/a>.<\/p>\n Kasper had only about three months left on the bench.\u00a0<\/p>\n His term expires on Dec. 31, 2031, but because he turns 70 in 2026, Kasper would no longer be able to serve as a judge past this year.\u00a0<\/p>\n Emery vowed to appeal the commission\u2019s decision to the state\u2019s highest court, which has final say.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s beyond the pale that this case is ripe for removal,\u201d he argued. \u201cIt\u2019s completely abhorrent. Nothing in this case involves anything he did on the bench.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tRelated<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A state judicial oversight commission ordered the removal of a Queens Civil Court judge after finding he continued…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":315946,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[9,24,63,122,124,123,2134],"class_list":["post-315945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news","tag-republicans"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315945","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=315945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315945\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/315946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}