Queens Dems select Supreme Court candidates
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The Queens County Democratic Party nominated Judges Cassandra Johnson, Karen Lin, Scott Dunn, Jessica Earle-Gargan and Peter Kelly (not pictured) to run on their party’s line for a spot on the State Supreme Court bench. Eagle photo by Jacob Kaye
By Jacob Kaye
The Queens County Democratic Party selected five judges to run on their party’s line in the upcoming general election for Queens Supreme Court.
Judges Cassandra Johnson, Karen Lin, Peter Kelly, Scott Dunn and Jessica Earle-Gargan will each run on the Democratic Party’s line for one of the five vacancies on the bench in the World’s Borough after being selected by the party at their annual judicial convention on Thursday evening.
The largely pro forma affair saw no dissension. Each judge was approved by Queens’ 129 judicial delegates unanimously, in stark contrast to the judicial conventions held by the Democratic Parties in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Though the judges will still have to run and win their elections in November, their ascension to the Supreme Court bench in the heavily Democratic borough is all but ensured. The Queens County Republican Party held their convention on Saturday, after the publication of this paper. In past years, the GOP has mostly cross-endorsed candidates picked by the Queens County Democrats.
“We know that you have to have a judge of certain character, coming from a community, understanding the people of the community of which they come,” said Rep. Gregory Meeks, the chairman of the Queens County Democratic Party. “It takes a person of humility, of understanding and respect to know that you are determining life, liberty or incarceration – that is a heck of a responsibility.”
“It's a responsibility for the entire community and it's a decision of trying to make sure that the proceedings are fair, that justice is had, and we have seen cases where we may believe that that was not the case,” he added. “But I got to tell you, the judges that we have nominated today are judges that have already risen to the task.”
Who is on the ballot?
Johnson was first elected to serve as a judge in Civil Court in 2021. The St. John’s School of Law graduate and former court attorney, law clerk and mediator, is a Queens native. Should she win her election, Johnson will become the first Haitian American woman to be elected to a State Supreme Court.
Johnson got her start in law by working in her mother’s law firm.
“To keep my mother's legacy, I've, as a judge, committed to creating equitable outcomes, ensuring that people are heard and securing an impartial administration of the law and will continue to do so as a Supreme Court justice,” Johnson said upon receiving the nomination.
“I know that I've achieved something far more than anything that my parents and grandparents could have ever imagined,” she added. “So, lastly, I'd like to thank my mom and my dad for believing that anything is possible, and for clearing the path so that I might rise to this occasion.”
Lin was elected to the Civil Court bench just last year. The Queens-raised former Housing Court judge and longtime court employee, received the backing of a number of the borough’s elected officials during her bid for Civil Court in 2022.
That support has not waivered – she was nominated for the Supreme Court bench by State Senator John Liu on Thursday.
Lin, who is currently one of only a handful of Asian American judges on the bench in Queens, will become the first East Asian woman elected to the Queens Supreme Court should she win her race in November. Asian Americans are the least represented racial or ethnic group in the state’s courts.
During her remarks, Lin made note of the path blazed by former Presiding Justice Randall Eng, who became the first Asian American elected to serve as a Supreme Court justice in 1991. Eng presided over the judicial convention on Thursday.
“Justice Eng, you have shattered a ceiling that makes it possible for me 33 years later to be standing at this podium,” Lin said. “You have set the bar high, and I will do my best to approach it.”
Earle-Gargan was first elected to Civil Court in 2020. Though she was initially assigned to serve as a jurist in Brooklyn, she was soon moved back to the borough in which she was elected. She currently serves in Queens Criminal Court and oversees the borough’s Domestic Violence Part.
Earle-Gargan, who lives in the same East Elmhurst house she grew up in, called her nomination to the Supreme Court the realization of a “life-long dream.”
“It all started a really long time ago, sitting at my dining room table when I was maybe five years old, and my father’s best friend used to come, and he would tell stories about being an attorney and the people that he would represent – and they were characters,” she said. “I used to sit at that table and listen to those stories and I was amazed at the injustice of the world, the justice of the world and what could be done if someone cared enough.”
Dunn, a Rockaway native, was first appointed to the bench in 2017 by then-Mayor Bill de Blasio. Eventually making his way to Criminal Court, Dunn oversaw a number of high-profile cases in Queens, including one involving Grammy-winning musician Cardi B.
He called his nomination to the Supreme Court bench a “miracle.”
“Anyone who’s gone through this will probably agree with me, it takes an absolute miracle to get here, but in Queens, we believe in miracles,” Dunn said.
Also nominated was Kelly, who currently serves as the county’s Surrogate Court judge. Kelly, who was unable to attend the convention, was set to have his term as Surrogate Court judge end in 2024.
Kelly began his legal career in 1984 as an associate law clerk, eventually being elevated to principal law clerk and working as a referee in Queens County Surrogate Court in 1992. He was elected to Civil Court in 1999 and later to Supreme Court in 2003. In 2011, he became a judge in Surrogate’s Court.
A predetermined result
Judges elected to the Supreme Court, which serves as the state’s trial courts, serve 14-year terms. Supreme Court justices are typically the jurists appointed to higher court positions, including to spots in the Appellate Division and on the Court of Appeals.
The Queens County Democratic Party’s nomination is highly sought after and largely determined by Meeks himself.
Here’s how the process works: Candidates put in their applications or are nominated to apply by local district leaders – this year, around two dozen candidates applied. Some are selected for interviews with Meeks, who then selects a group of candidates to “recommend” to the delegates.
The delegates, who are elected to the party position for this one event, are very rarely told in advance which candidates the chairman has recommended. Like most conventions, the delegates arrived on Thursday to find some, but not all, of the candidates’ resumes placed on chairs.
Despite being given little opportunity to vet the candidates themselves, the delegates frequently vote to approve the judges without any conflict.
However, last year’s convention saw some push back from a group of around 30 progressive delegates known as New Reformers, who argued that the process for selecting the judges in Queens was too opaque.
They offered a protest vote not only to each candidate presented to them, but also to each procedural vote, as well.
Prior to the convention, the group of delegates wrote a letter to Meeks and to party leadership urging a number of changes to the convention process that they said would make the process more “transparent.”
In response, the party posted online the names and resumes of the candidates who were applying for a nomination about a week before the convention.
However, this year, the New Reformers ran far fewer candidates than they had in years past and even fewer were elected. Only 9 New Reformers ran for judicial delegate seats and only one won – a second was elected as an alternate delegate.
And this year, the resumes and names of those who applied for the party’s nomination were not posted online prior to the convention.
A party official told the Eagle on Friday that the resumes weren’t posted online because none of the delegates were asking for them.
John Scott, a New Reformer who ran for a judicial delegate position this year but lost, said that he was disappointed that the transparency measures weren’t included in this year’s convention.
“Each of these judges has the ability to impact thousands of New Yorkers and the fact that there is zero vetting that goes into these judges, the fact that we get handed their resumes at the very last minute and are not supposed to have any sort of healthy debate over these candidates. to me, is insane,” Scott said. “There are so many New Yorkers that are impacted by the decisions that happened in that room.”
According to Scott, the New Reformers plan on ramping up their efforts to run for judicial delegate positions in 2024, potentially offering more of a challenge to the party at next year’s convention.
