De Blasio criticizes courts

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Mayor Bill de Blasio called out the OCA this week for not restarting operations as fast as he would have hoped. Photo courtesy of the Mayor’s Office/Flickr

Mayor Bill de Blasio called out the OCA this week for not restarting operations as fast as he would have hoped. Photo courtesy of the Mayor’s Office/Flickr

By Jacob Kaye

Mayor Bill de Blasio continued criticizing the state’s court system Tuesday, calling on its leaders to speed up the pace of play and complete more trials in New York City.

The mayor said that the courts were “not fully functioning when so many other parts of our society are fully functioning,” Tuesday during his daily press briefing. The comments were similar to those made by de Blasio the day before.

“I would like to hear from the folks who run the courts not their excuses or pointing fingers elsewhere, but just say what they're going to do to fix it right now,” de Blasio said. “ There's so many places where people are back, but our court system is just not functioning and it’s moving at a snail's pace compared to the rest of the state.”

Hizzoner called out courts in New York City in particular, saying that statewide, around 40 cases are being tried on average. In New York City, there have been, on average, seven cases a month, according to the mayor.

De Blasio also said that in the first six months of 2019, there were 405 trial verdicts in New York City. In the first six months of 2021, there have been 18 trial verdicts in New York City.

The courts resumed trials in mid-March.

The Office of Court Administration fought back against the allegations of sluggishness in the state’s judiciary.

“​​We are confounded why the mayor is fixated on blaming the courts, when we have been at full staffing capacity since May,” said Lucian Chalfen, the spokesperson for the OCA.

In his remarks on Monday, de Blasio pointed out that if the New York Yankees could get fans back into the seats, the courts could too resume operations at full capacity, a comment the OCA took umbrage with.

“Yankee Stadium is outdoors; courtrooms, grand jury and trial jury rooms are not. And people summoned for jury duty don’t have much of a choice,” Chalfen said. “Also no state court system is operating at full capacity – for obvious reasons.”

COVID-19 cases have been on the rise throughout the court system, as they have been throughout the state. There have been 155 positive cases reported inside the courts statewide in August, according to OCA data. The month prior, there were 33 cases reported.

Chalfen said that despite COVID concerns and protocols,“forty-five felony trials have commenced since we resumed jury trials in mid-March.

De Blasio linked the alleged slowness of the courts to the effects it has on public safety. He said that when cases aren’t tried, those who commit violent crimes feel emboldened to do so.

Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, said that gun violence in New York City – shootings are up 7 percent in 2021 when compared to last year – could be curbed if the courts prosecuted the relatively small number of people who are committing an outsized number of the shootings.

“Right now, we have no justice with no trial,” Wexler said. “Doing something about the courts will do something about crime...We’re just saying to the courts, we need your help, help New York City be a safer place.”

In mid-August, criminal courts throughout the five boroughs teamed up with district attorneys in Queens, the Bronx, Manhattan, Brooklyn and Staten Island to work to make a dent in the backlog of felony gun cases in the city.

The initiative, led by Queens Supreme Court Administrative Judge for Criminal Matters George Grasso, has been making progress, the judge said.

Grasso said that in the two weeks since the program began, courts in the city have indicted 100 cases, bringing the backlog of unindicted cases from 1,802 to 1,702.

“Those are very encouraging initial trends because this is a category of case where over the course of the last year and a half, especially when we were the point in time where we didn't have grand juries, and then we had minimal grand juries, that these backlogs really grew quite significantly,” Grasso said. “To be two weeks into this initiative and starting to see this kind of data, I have to say it is very encouraging.”

Grasso said that he wished the mayor took a more collaborative approach to speeding up the court’s operations, instead of blaming lags on the court’s leadership.

“I absolutely disagree with the mayor and I think that it's kind of sad in the way that he's choosing to play the blame game rather than accept responsibility to work as a partner with the different components of the system, including the court system in a positive way,” he said.

“We're looking to deal with the world as we're dealing with it and the realities that we have right now in a positive and proactive way,” Grasso added.