Lawmakers call on state to ‘fully fund’ Family Court
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State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal and State Assemblymember Charles Lavine called on the legislature and the governor to allocate $102 million to the state’s Family Courts in this coming fiscal year’s budget. Screenshot via Hoylman-Sigal
By Jacob Kaye
A group of state lawmakers gathered in Albany on Monday to call on the governor to send $102 million to New York’s struggling Family Courts in the coming fiscal year.
The funding request, which was detailed by Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Brad Hoylman-Sigal and Assembly Judiciary Committee Chair Charles Lavine on Monday, meets the wishes of the court system’s leadership, who testified about the struggles and needs of the state’s Family Courts during a joint budget hearing in January.
The request from lawmakers also comes several months after they held a hearing on the troubled courts.
What they heard from litigants, lawyers, court employees and judges were descriptions of a court system that has not been properly staffed or funded for years, and that is currently struggling under the weight of the largest growing backlog of all the courts in the state.
Those at the November hearing also described hostile courtrooms where pro se litigants, unable to find an affordable attorney or be provided one by the state, are pushed around by overworked judges. Some said the court system unfairly and indiscriminately separates children from their parents and allows abuse to fester as cases languish.
The testimony at both the budget hearing and the November hearing on Family Court led Hoylman-Sigal, Lavine and Queens Assemblymember Andrew Hevesi, who chairs the Committee on Children and Families, to call for the increased funding.
“This is the year when we need to fully fund Family Court,” Hoylman-Sigal said.
Much of the funding requested by the lawmakers echoed the call made by Chief Administrative Judge Joseph Zayas during the January budget hearing.
The lawmakers said their request includes over $20 million in funding to bring on nearly 30 new Family Court judges.
It also includes putting $50 million toward funding for the Office of Indigent Legal Services and $20 million for attorneys for children to address the dwindling number of court-appointed attorneys available to parents and children.
The troubles inside New York State’s Family Courts are well documented.
In 2020, former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said in his seminal racial justice report that much like other high-volume courts faced with large backlogs – particularly those in New York City – the state’s Family Courts had a “dehumanizing” and “demeaning cattle-call culture.”
According to the report, a vast majority of litigants in Family Courts are people of color, though the demographic make up of the bench is not.
And while issues in all courts have serious consequences, Johnson made particular note of the consequences of slow moving cases in Family Courts in his report.
“In the case of Family Court, delays in processing a case can mean potentially permanent damage to children, particularly when those delays impact reunification,” the 2020 report read. “As one Family Court Judge noted, in this context, ‘justice delayed is justice denied.’”
Three years after the issuing of Johnson’s report, troubles inside Family Court have continued.
According to the chief administrative judge, no other court part in the state’s court system saw a larger increase in cases than Family Court in 2023. Last year, the criminal parts of Supreme and County Courts increased by 18 percent, Supreme Court, Civil Term increased by 10 percent and Family Court saw a 26 percent increase.
But as the caseloads got higher, the number of judges and staff inside Family Court didn’t increase at the same rate.
As requested by Zayas, lawmakers on Monday called on the state to send the courts the funding to bring on 28 new Family Court judges and the staff to support them.
Currently, the gaps on the bench are often filled by Supreme Court justices, which not only creates a vacancy on their respective Supreme Court bench but also sends judges without the relevant experience to Family Court. The problem is especially pronounced in the five boroughs.
Hoylman-Sigal said the funding for new judges “will allow New York City to end the practice of rotating in and out Supreme Court justices who have no experience in Family Court, and it will alleviate the ever growing backlog of cases, cutting down delays and ensuring all litigants can have their case resolved expeditiously.”
The lawmakers also hope that this year’s budget addresses the ongoing crisis on the state’s 18-B panels, which have been seeing their numbers decline for years.
The lack of attorneys available to represent children or parents has meant cases languish, or force some people to represent themselves.
Though the pay rate for 18-B attorneys was increased for the first time in decades by the governor in last year’s budget, the salary boost hasn’t yet resulted in increased panel numbers.
State lawmakers are calling on New York’s Family Courts to be funded to the tune of $102 million in the upcoming state budget. Eagle file photo by Walter Karling
“The reason why you need Family Court lawyers to protect families, to keep them together is because New York State is separating families like it's going out of style,” Hevesi said. “We do it all the time, and separated families is a childhood trauma on par with physical abuse and other abuses.”
“They need their lawyers in court,” the Queens lawmaker added.
Lavine, who formerly worked as a Family Court attorney, said that funding the state’s Family Courts extends beyond a moral obligation.
“We need to fund these Family Courts – we need to do this not simply because it's the right thing to do, not simply because it is our solemn responsibility,” he said. “We need to do this because if our Family Courts fail, we fail. We fail as a democracy.”
The Long Island lawmaker also noted the high cost of fully funding the courts in the budget but assured his colleagues and the governor that it was worth the price.
“Democracy is expensive,” he said. “Injustice, however, is infinitely more expensive.”
While the lawmakers fight for the funding in the legislature, they’ve already gotten buy-in from court leadership.
Zayas and Chief Judge Rowan Wilson said shortly after both were appointed to their respective positions last year that reforming the state’s Family Courts would be at the top of their priority list.
Soon after taking office, the scrapped former Chief Judge Janet DiFiore’s plan to reorganize the entire court system and said they instead would only look to reform a few problem areas, chiefly Family Court.
“We want to desperately change the culture of Family Court,” Zayas said during the January budget hearing.
In the past year, top court officials have taken a number of actions and made a number of new policies they claim have already begun to take effect in the courts.
They appointed Judge Richard Rivera as the state’s first-ever statewide coordinating judge for Family Court Matters.
They have also ordered supervisors and administrative judges in Family Courts to meet with stakeholders more often and meet with judges to ensure that all parties inside the courtroom are being listened to.
“It’s really our top priority,” Zayas said in January. “How do we elevate Family Court to be the court that it needs to be? Believe me when I say, we are doing everything in our power to do that.”
