Judge Richardson-Mendelson reflects on court system's equal justice report
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Deputy Chief Administrative Judge for Social Justice Initiatives Edwina Richardson-Mendelson. Photo via NYS Courts
By Ryan Schwach
Last month, the New York State Unified Court System released a “year in review” report on its efforts to address racial bias within the court system.
Stemming from the 2020 equal justice in the courts report commissioned during the racial justice movement following the murder of George Floyd, the Equal Justice in the Courts Initiative’s report laid out work done in courtrooms from Jamaica and Buffalo to address issues with equity and bias.
Judge Edwina Richardson-Mendelson, the deputy chief administrative judge for Social Justice Initiatives who oversaw that work, is now reflecting on the past year and what still needs to be done in the state’s courthouses.
“I feel delighted, thrilled, I am over the top pleased with the work that we are doing,” Richardson-Mendelson, a Queens native, told the Eagle. “When we think of where we started in 2020, when we first received Secretary [Jeh] Johnson's report, to where we are today, through the pandemic, and difficult times and seasons of transition in our courts.
“We have remained laser focused on promoting equal justice,” she added. “We have addressed most of the recommendations, but we are just beginning this permanent work of the courts.”
The 2020 Jeh Johnson report detailed 13 recommendations to make the courts more equipped in matters of racial and social justice.
“There are so many good things that can be done, and that's presented a challenge for us,” Richardson-Mendelson said. “Because there is limited time, there's limited resources. How do we do our best and address every single thing that we have a commitment to address?”
The first order of business became addressing bias in the court, inside and out. From the bias of jurors, to the bias of court employees, weeding out bias in an institution where the consequences of bias are extreme, became a priority.
“We're supposed to be the rule of law, the holders of justice, and the idea that there can be bias in our decision making in our actions in any way,” she said, “So addressing that as an issue for a court system is critically important.”
To address this, the courts instituted a system-wide bias training for people coming in to serve jury duty, as well as court employees, starting at the top.
“We can't ask people to trust the courts if the highest level leaders are not all on board,” she said. “Early on, our chief administrators and our chief judge and our court leaders were the first to engage in the mandatory bias training that we put forward.”
According to the report, 73.6 percent of training survey respondents either agreed or strongly agreed that the training will help them treat people more fairly.
“Distributing mandatory bias training to everyone in the court system, and creating it and distributing it, was a challenge and we met that challenge and that's been done,” Richardson-Mendelson said. “That's going to continue to be done. That's going to be an ongoing, regular thing that we do.”
She added that new rounds of training will be more role or job specific.
“If we're not addressing perceived and actual bias that happens in the way our court systems operate, we're not doing all that is ours to do,” she added.
Another main goal was increasing the court’s work outside the confines of the courthouses themselves, and reaching out to the community.
“I've asked two things of the equal justice committees, one to make sure that they know their local equal justice history…the second thing I've asked for equal justice committees to do is to engage with our community, people who are in the community either in our schools, or just local people who are interested in the courts to make sure that we're not just doing this by ourselves, that we are engaging with community,” she said.
Richardson-Mendelson says this effort is the one she is most proud of.
For instance, courthouses in Ulster County created an exhibit on Sojourner Truth, the civil rights activist who became the first Black woman to successfully sue a white man in 1828. Here in Queens, Civil and Family Court leaders have made efforts to go into schools and address kids both on the inner workings of the court and potential careers, and have done work to research the history of the slave trade in New York City.
“Queen's equal justice committees are committed to that, they've already gone into the schools and created programming at the law school level,” she said.
Another step has been expanding the preexisting ways the court’s work toward equity, like the office of diversity and inclusion and the inspector general’s office.
More recently, the system hired a statewide equal justice coordinator who will keep all the courts from the Catskills to Jamaica on an even keel.
“They're going to be creating a resource guide for all of our equal justice committees, and they're going to be posting what everybody is doing so Queens will know what's happening in Ulster County, and Ulster County will learn what Queens is doing, and they can share ideas,” she said.
“Equal justice is local,” she said.
Going forward, a next step for Richardson-Mendelson is to increase the trust between court officers and people visiting the court by bringing community affairs court officers into the building. Court officers are often the first court employees people meet upon entering a court building.
Court officers all already received name tags as part of the equal justice initiative, which they did not have before.
In addition, commissioners of jurors are now required to submit community engagement plans to reach out to the community and educate them on civic duty.
“The commissioners of jurors in every region of the state are able to work with the community to make sure people want to do jury duty, their civic duty,” she said. “It's not just voting.”
Although she is proud of the work, Richardson-Mendelson says there is far more work that needs to be done.
“This is permanent ongoing work,” she said. “It is not a short term project that we're going to abandon. This is embedded into how our courts operate and continually work to be the best we can be with the communities we're privileged to serve, and I'm very, very pleased to be a part of it.”
