Queens judges lack diversity, report finds

A new report from the New York State courts found judges often aren’t the same race or ethnicity as the defendants who appear before them. File photo by David Brand

By Jacob Kaye

A wide disparity exists between the races and ethnicities of people who appear in Queens courts and the judges who hear their cases, data from the New York State courts shows.

The disparity is largest among Black defendants and judges in Queens, the most diverse county in the United States, according to the report by Lawrence K. Marks, the chief administrator of the courts. 

While Black judges accounted for only 25 percent of all judges in the borough’s entire court system in 2020, 55 percent of all people who received prison sentences in Queens in 2019 were Black, according to the most recent data. 

“Diversity [in the courts] is a big issue in Queens,” said New York Supreme Court Justice Carmen Velasquez, who also serves as the head of the Supreme Court Justices Association of New York. “It affects the systematic racism that’s going on right now.”

The data from the report, which was self-reported, shows that half of Queens judges are white, 7 percent are Asian and around 16 percent are Hispanic or Latino. 

Last year, Justice Kenneth Holder became the only Black man serving in Queens Supreme Court, Criminal Term, after the Office of Court Administration decided not to re-certify 46 judges who applied across New York for budgetary reasons. One of those 46 former judges, Daniel Lewis, was one of the few remaining Black judges in Queens. Two others, Justices Ronald Hollie and Leslie Leach retired last year. 

According to an OCA spokesperson, the office assigns and reassigns judges where it feels the operational need is greatest. 

“The dearth of Black judges, particularly men, is shameful,” Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Erika Edwards, one of only a handful of Black judges in the state, told the Eagle in October. 

While she believes it isn’t intentional, Velasquez lays blame for the lack of diversity on the bench at the feet of the OCA. 

“The reality is that the Office of Court Administration does not really understand that the people in the county want to have judges that reflect their population,” she said. “It may not be racially motivated...but the OCA is blinded towards the sensibilities of the community.”

Last June, Chief Judge Janet DiFiore commissioned a report to look at diversity and inclusion throughout the court system. 

The report, authored by former U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson and published in October 2020, made a series of recommendations to boost diversity numbers and combat systemic racism within the court system. Some of its recommendations included robust bias training, a zero-tolerance discrimination policy, incorporating an implicit bias training into juror training and making best practices for processing bias complaints, among several others. 

“I was reminded over the last four months of the intense pride and dedication that many in and around the New York State court system feel for their work,” Johnson said at the time of the report’s publishing. “In my assessment as a lawyer, a student of history, a former public official, and as an African American, this is a moment that demands a strong and pronounced rededication to equal justice under law by the New York State court system.”

The OCA is in the process of implementing a number of the recommendations made in the report, the spokesperson said.