Who’s running to become a judge in Queens?
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There are five vacancies in Queens’ Civil Court in November’s general election. Eagle file photo by Walter Karling
By Jacob Kaye
Well over a dozen candidates are running in November’s general election with the hopes of winning a spot inside Queens’ courts.
Seventeen candidates – some of whom are already serving as judges – are each running for one of the several judicial openings in the World’s Borough in the upcoming general election. While one candidate will be running in a judicial race without an opponent, all others will be running in a contested election.
Among the contested races in the borough this year is the race for Queens Surrogate’s Court, a little-known court that is now home to arguably the most critical judicial race for the Queens County Democratic Party, whose preferred candidates have held the seat for decades. The party’s candidate, Cassandra Johnson, beat out a well-funded primary opponent over the summer, but now faces a rare challenge from a candidate backed by the Queens County Republican Party, Stephen Weiner.
There are also seven candidates running for five spots on the borough’s Civil Court after a law passed earlier this year by the state legislature created three new vacancies on the court. Additionally, there are nine candidates running for seven spots on Queens Supreme Court bench.
Here’s a breakdown of which candidates are running for which judicial seats in Queens in the Nov. 5 election.
Surrogate’s Court
The race to serve as Queens’ sole Surrogate’s Court judge will be between Queens Supreme Court Justice Cassandra Johnson and Stephen Weiner, a longtime attorney from Sunnyside.
The winner of the race will be elected to a 14-year term atop the court that deals with issues related to guardianships, estates and wills. Surrogate’s Court in New York City is often referred to as one of the last vestiges of “political patronage” in the city, primarily because of the large amounts of money that are often up for question in the court.
For the first time in decades, the race for Queens Surrogate’s Court will include a Republican candidate.
Weiner is a longtime attorney from Western Queens who has mostly practiced in trust and estates law. He began his legal career with a number of law firms before launching his own private practice in 1985. The attorney received his law degree from Columbia Law School.
According to his campaign website, Weiner served as the Queens Republican Commissioner of Elections from 1997 to 2004.
Weiner has won endorsements from a number of Queens’ Republican and conservative figures, including City Councilmembers Joann Ariola, Vickie Paladino and Robert Holden.
However, Johnson comes into the race with several major advantages.
To start, Johnson is running as a Democrat in a borough where Democratic voters outnumber Republican voters seven to one.
She also came into the general election following a contested primary race, during which she raised a lot of money. According to the state’s campaign finance board, Johnson had $77,000 in her campaign coffers heading into the final weeks of the campaign. Weiner, who has raised $11,000 since announcing his candidacy earlier this year, has around $6,000 left to spend on his campaign.
Johnson, who has enjoyed years of support from the Queens County Democratic Party, has seen a swift rise through the ranks of Queens’ judiciary.
The Queens native was first elected to Civil Court in 2021. In 2023, she was again selected by the Queens County Democratic Party to run on the party’s line for one of several Supreme Court vacancies in the borough. She won her election, becoming the first Haitian American woman to be elected to a State Supreme Court.
Johnson attended St. John’s University in Queens for both her undergraduate and law degrees. After graduating, she began working as an attorney with a private firm in Brooklyn for a year before she entered the city’s Human Resources Administration as a staff attorney. She spent the intervening years as a law secretary, law clerk and briefly as a senior court attorney for the Law Department.
Johnson won the Democratic primary race for Surrogate’s Court in June, beating Civil Court Judge Wendy Li.
Though Li held a significant fundraising advantage over Johnson, the Supreme Court justice won the race by nearly 10 percentage points.
Supreme Court
There are seven vacancies this year on Queens’ Supreme Court bench.
Unlike the races for Civil Court and Surrogate’s Court, candidates running for Supreme Court do not run in a primary election. Instead, they are selected by a party to appear on that party’s ballot line in the November general election.
In August, the Queens County Democratic Party selected its seven candidates for Supreme Court at its annual judicial convention. The Queens County Republican Party selected its candidates several days later, cross-endorsing two of the Democratic candidates and nominating two candidates of their own.
The Queens Dems voted to nominate Civil Court Supervising Judge Alan Schiff, Civil Court Judges Delsia Marshall, Sandra Munoz, Andrea Ogle, John Katsanos and Acting Supreme Court Justices Lumarie Maldonado Cruz and Claudia Lanzetta to their party line.
The GOP voted to nominate attorneys Gary Muraca and Kathy Wu Parrino to run on their party line. They also voted to cross-endorse Schiff and Lanzetta.
Lanzetta hails from Northern Queens. The acting Supreme Court justice was first elected to the bench in 2020, and was initially assigned to serve in Brooklyn’s Criminal Court. Around a year later, she was moved to her home borough and later assigned to Supreme Court in October 2023. Prior to her election, she worked in the court system as a principal law clerk and court attorney for Judge Rudolph Greco.
Schiff currently serves as the supervising judge of the borough’s lower Civil Court, where he’s worked since 2021. He was first elected in 2020 and assigned to Brooklyn’s Criminal Court. Schiff spent years working for one of Queens’ senior-most judges – Justice Bernice Siegal, who employed Schiff as her principal law clerk.
Katsanos was the longest-serving judge nominated to the Supreme Court bench by the Dems in August. He was first elected as a Civil Court judge in 2018. He’s served on the Queens Civil Court bench since then. Prior to his election, Katsanos served in the federal judicial system, working as a judicial law clerk in U.S. Bankruptcy Court and as a law clerk in the U.S. Court of International Trade.
Ogle was first elected to the Civil Court bench in 2021 after running her own law practice for over 20 years in Jamaica. Ogle moved with her family from Guyana to Cambria Heights when she was a teen, and has lived most of her life in Queens. Upon her election in 2021, she became one of the first South Asian women elected to the bench – two other women of South Asian descent were elected alongside her that year.
The two newest members of the judiciary to get a nomination from the Dems were Marshall and Munoz. Both were elected to Civil Court last year and didn’t begin their service on the bench until January of this year.
Marshall, a graduate of New York University School of Law, currently serves in Brooklyn Civil Court. She ran a private practice in the World’s Borough for around a year before her election. Marshall also worked as a private attorney at several firms and as an attorney in the city’s Law Department.
Munoz also worked as a solo practitioner prior to her election, focusing on matrimonial and family law. She also spent years on the borough’s 18-B panel, representing children and indigent clients in Queens’ Family Court. Before being elected, she supervised all 18-B attorneys representing victims of domestic violence in Queens.
Maldonado Cruz was first elected to the bench in 2020. With the backing of Hiram Monserrate, the former state lawmaker who was convicted of corruption charges, Maldonado Cruz beat out a Queens County Democratic Party-backed candidate in the 2020 primary. Maldonado Cruz was the first of what became several insurgent candidates backed by Monserrate to defeat candidates backed by the party apparatus.
After winning the general election, Maldonado Cruz was assigned to work in Manhattan Criminal Court, where she quickly gained a reputation – the judge set bail against criminal defendants at a higher rate than any other judge in the five boroughs, New York Focus reported.
Muraca is an attorney who has been practicing law in both the five boroughs and Long Beach since 1983. He’s a graduate of CUNY Law School. He ran for a spot on the Supreme Court bench last year. The sole Republican candidate in the 2023, Muraca finished last in the race, winning a little more than 8 percent of the vote but finishing with half as many votes as the second-fewest vote getter.
Parrino is a Taiwanese immigrant and CUNY School of Law graduate. She served as an ADA in Kings County and as a staff attorney at the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct. She also worked as a principal attorney for the Attorney Grievance Committee. Parrino ran a losing race for a Civil Court seat in 2021.
Civil Court
After the legislature quickly passed and the governor signed into law a bill earlier this year, the number of Civil Court seats up for grabs in Queens this November more than doubled.
The law created three new vacancies on the court. State lawmakers waited until after the state’s primaries had long passed to send the bill to the governor, requiring parties to nominate candidates for the seats to run in the general election. The process for the nominations breaks from how a vast majority of Civil Court candidates are nominated to run: winning a primary.
Around a week after the law was passed, the Democratic Party selected Amish Doshi, Melissa B. DeBerry and Peter Lane to run in the race. The Republican Party selected Stephen Dachtera and Mary-Ann Elizabeth Maloney, and cross-endorsed Lane.
Lane got his law degree from St. John’s University School of Law in 1991. After working as an intern in the federal court system, Lane went on to spend a bulk of his career working in the state’s court system. He worked as a principal law clerk to a number of judges in Queens, including the borough’s Surrogate Court judge. The attorney also previously served as a member of Queens Community Board 7 in Flushing.
Doshi was nominated for the bench shortly after he lost to a Monserrate-backed candidate in the June Democratic primary race for a different set of vacancies on the Civil Court.
Doshi is the founding member and principal attorney for the Doshi Legal Group. He’s mainly practiced in a number of different financial law areas, including creditor’s rights, bankruptcy and commercial litigation. Doshi earned his law degree from New York Law School and his undergraduate degree from Queens College. In addition to being an attorney, he is also a certified public accountant. The attorney also has a presence in Queens’ legal community, serving as one of the co-founders of the South Asian and Indo-Caribbean Bar Association of Queens, which was created in 2017.
DeBerry currently serves as the principal law clerk to Queens Supreme Court Justice Cheree Buggs. The longtime Southeast Queens resident told the Eagle during an interview in March that she knew that she wanted to be an attorney from a young age. She earned her law degree from Hofstra University and later went on to work for Buggs in the state’s court system. She followed the judge from Family Court, to Civil Court to Supreme Court.
During the March interview, DeBerry told the Eagle that becoming a jurist was her “ultimate aspiration.”
Dachtera, a graduate of St. John’s University School of Law, is an attorney based in Richmond Hill. He primarily practices real estate law.
Maloney, a graduate of Touro Law, practices law in Brooklyn. She’s admitted to practice law in both New York and New Jersey.
Also running for a Civil Court seat are Sharifa Nasser-Cuéllar and Glenda Hernandez, who won the Democratic primary for two vacancies on the court in June, and William Shanahan, a Republican candidate who won his primary without a challenger.
Nasser-Cuéllar was born and raised in Queens and has spent a majority of her career working in matrimonial, family and criminal law. She owned a solo law practice and also worked as a judicial hearing officer for New York City’s Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings. Nasser-Cuéllar also helped solve claims for the New York State Department of Education.
Hernandez, who works as a court attorney but previously worked as a supervising attorney at the Urban Justice Center and as a private attorney representing tenants in Housing Court cases, was supported in her primary race by Monserrate.
Shanahan has run for a judicial position in Queens each of the past three years. The attorney and Queens native, who consistently has earned a “qualified” rating from the local bar associations, never came closer to winning one of his races as he did last year in the race for a vacancy in the Civil Court’s 6th Municipal District. He lost that race by around four percentage points to Evelyn Gong, the Democratic candidate.
Lastly, attorney Elizabeth Newton is running unopposed for a Civil Court seat in the borough’s 4th Municipal District, which covers a portion of Central Queens.
Newton began her legal career by prosecuting child abuse and neglect cases in Family Court as an attorney with the Adminstration for Children Servcies. She went on to work as an attorney with the Legal Aid Society’s civil practice. She currently works as the supervising attorney for the public defense firm’s criminal defense practice.
Early voting for the upcoming general election begins on Oct. 26 and runs through Nov. 3. The general election will be held on Nov. 5.
