Queens Dems pick Civil Court candidates to support in 2023 primary
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Queens Democratic Civil Court candidates Michael Goldman, Delsia Marshall, Sandra Perez, Sandra Muñoz and Evelyn Gong. Photo via Queens County Democratic Party
By Jacob Kaye
Members of the Queens County Democratic Party voted last week to support five candidates for various spots on the borough’s Civil Court bench, including one candidate who was upset in a loss during a Democratic primary race for the bench in 2021.
Meeting at their party headquarters in Forest Hills, the Queens Dems voted unanimously to throw their weight behind attorneys Sandra Perez, Sandra Muñoz, Michael Goldman, Delsia Marshall and Evelyn Gong, each of whom are running for one of the five different vacancies on the Queens Civil Court bench.
Perez will be running for the countywide Civil Court seat. Goldman will be running for a vacancy in the 1st Municipal District, which includes Astoria, Long Island City and a small part of Sunnyside and Woodside. Muñoz will be running for the vacancy in the 2nd Municipal District, which includes a large portion of Western and Central Queens, including neighborhoods like Sunnyside, Woodside, Jackson Heights, Corona, Elmhurst, East Elmhurst, Maspeth, Rego Park and Forest Hills.
Marshall will be running for the vacancy in the 4th Municipal District, which is made up of a large portion of Southeast Queens, including Jamaica, Laurelton, Cambria Heights, Hollis, Queens Village and Bellerose. Gong will be running for the vacancy in the 6th Municipal District, which includes Flushing, College Point, Bay Terrace, Auburndale, Kew Gardens Hills and Fresh Meadows.
The candidates will be running for the seats in the June 27 Democratic primary election.
The Queens County Republican Party has yet to formally vote on the candidates it intends to support for Civil Court.
Civil Court judges deal with civil cases where the disputed amount is $49,999 or less.
The judges are elected to serve 10 year terms, during which they may end up serving in the city’s Civil, Criminal or Housing Courts. Despite being elected in a specific judicial district or borough, the judges are often moved to serve in courts in areas where they weren’t elected based on the needs of the court system.
Elected Civil Court judges are also frequently among the first to be considered for Supreme Court judgeships – there are no primaries for Supreme Court positions, and the city’s political parties choose the candidates to run on their line in the general.
A diverse slate
In recent years, the Queens County Democratic Party, which is led by Rep. Gregory Meeks, has said that it’s making an effort to diversify the crop of candidates it supports as part of a larger effort to diversify what has been historically a racially and ethnically homogenous bench.
According to a self-reported racial and ethnicity report of New York judges, in 2022, around 45 percent of all judges in Queens’ Civil Court, Housing Court and Criminal Court were white – around 25 percent of Queens residents are white. Around 18 percent of judges were Latino, around 10 percent were Black and around 5 percent were Asian American. Queens’ population is 28 percent Latino, 20 percent Black and over 27 percent Asian.
Antonio Alfonso, a district leader and the political director of the Queens County Democratic Party, told the Eagle that this year’s Civil Court slate, as well as past slates, represent “a commitment that the organization at large has [to diversifying the bench].”
“[Meeks has] a commitment to the diversity of Queens so that those on the bench are representative of what Queens looks like,”Alfonso said. “That really is a major priority and one that I think [Meeks] is very proud to keep striving toward.”
Should Goldman be elected, he would become the first openly gay judge elected to the Queens bench – a milestone he attempted to reach in 2021 when he ran for a countywide Civil Court seat.
Émilia Decaudin, a district leader in Western Queens, told the Eagle that she was excited to support his candidacy.
“Having a queer judge elected in Queens is something that we just still haven't done yet,” Decaudin said. “I'm looking forward to doing my part to make sure that he gets elected, so that there's someone in my community who is on the bench.”
Goldman lost to now-Judge Soma Syed in a close 2021 primary.
Goldman, a Bayside native, has spent well over two decades practicing law. He has spent time at private law firms and serving as a court attorney and principal law clerk for judges in Queens Civil and Supreme Court.
Muñoz is a practicing attorney who works in family and matrimonial law. She is a member of the borough’s 18-B panel, or a panel of attorneys who are assigned to work with indigent or children clients. Muñoz is also a former president of the Latino Lawyers Association of Queens.
Marshall is a private attorney who primarily handles personal injury cases with Shafer Partners, where she’s worked since 2017. Marshall, who received her law degree from the New York University School of Law, is the past president of the Allen Lawyers’ Guild, a church ministry that sponsors free legal seminars.
Gong, who serves as the Asian American Bar Association of New York’s treasurer, is an attorney with her own practice in Queens. She received her law degree from St. John’s University School of Law.
Perez has been practicing law in New York City for nearly three decades. She began her career in the Brooklyn district attorney’s office. She later went on to serve as the attorney-in-charge of the Criminal-Immigration Unit at New York County Defenders. She currently has a criminal defense private practice based in Queens.
Recent troubles
While the 2021 loss by a county candidate to an insurgent candidate was a surprise to a number of political observers at the time, it signified what was then and now continues to be a growing trend.
Queens County Democratic Party-supported Civil Court candidates have lost to insurgent Democrats or Republican challengers in all but one of the past four years.
In 2019, party-supported Wyatt Gibbons lost a race to Judge Lumarie Maldonado-Cruz, who was supported by disgraced former State Senator and current District Leader Hiram Monserrate.
Gibbons was later nominated by the Queens Democratic Party to run for the Supreme Court bench, where he currently serves.
Last year, Thomas Oliva, who had the support of the Queens Democratic Party, lost a primary race to now-Judge Maria Gonzalez, who was also supported by Monserrate.
Also last year, Paul Vallone, a former Queens city councilmember and the member of a family with a long history in Queens politics, lost to now-Queens Supreme Court Judge Joseph Kasper, who was at the time a perennial Republican judicial candidate.
When asked if the Queens Democratic Party was changing its approach to Civil Court candidates and races as a result of the string of losses, Alfonso said that the party was confident in the slate of candidates they plan to support in 2023.
“It's just a matter of working with the community, working with the district leaders and continuing to put up good candidates,” he said.
Decaudin, who said she has “discussed with leadership what my plan is” to get Goldman elected, but added that she hasn’t been privy to any larger conversations happening within the party about a new approach when it comes to the Civil Court.
Part of the problem, according to party officials, is that judicial candidates are relatively restrained in what they can and can’t do while on the campaign trail. Unlike other candidates running for public office, judicial candidates are expected to come across as apolitical in what is obviously a political situation.
“They're not politicians in the same way – by virtue of running there are politicians but they're not always experienced campaign people,” Decaudin said. “So, one can say that they need [party] support more than a regular candidate does, but what the balances is an open question.”
