Queens Dems nominate judicial candidates to run on party’s line
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The Queens Democratic Party, led by Representative Greg Meeks, nominated three candidates to run on their party’s line in this year’s judicial elections. Photo via Ali Najmi/Twitter
By Ryan Schwach
The Queens County Democratic Party this week nominated three candidates for various judicial vacancies, including one for the coveted Surrogate’s Court judgeship.
On Thursday, the Queens Dems nominated the three judicial candidates to run on the party’s line during the June Democratic primary, including attorneys Sharifa Nasser-Cuellar and Amish Doshi for Civil Court positions and Judge Cassandra Johnson, who was just recently elected to serve as a Supreme Court judge, for Surrogate Court judge, a much-desired role in the county’s courts.
The nominations come a little more than four months before the June 25 primaries and after a handful of other judicial candidates have already filed to run.
The borough’s Surrogate judge oversees matters related to wills and estates. Judges elected to the position serve for 14-year terms and must retire at the age of 70. There is only a single Surrogate Court judge in Queens County.
The race for the seat comes as Acting Surrogate Court Judge Peter Kelly’s term comes to an end at the close of 2024. Kelly, who’s Surrogate’s term began in 2011, was elected to serve in Supreme Court last year, a year before the expiration of his term.
However, after his election created a vacancy on the court, Kelly was named acting Surrogate Court judge and will likely serve in the role until the start of 2025, when a successor is elected.
The Queens Dems pick for that successor is Johnson, who was a Queens Civil Court judge up until she was elected to serve as a Supreme Court judge alongside Kelly and three others in November.
Kelly received the second-most votes of the judges running for Supreme Court in the 11th District, with 85,980 votes, only behind Scott Dunn, who was the only candidate to run on both the Republican and Democratic Party lines.
Johnson received 81,254 votes, the least of the five candidates who were ultimately elected to the bench.
A Queens native, 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.
She was elected to Civil Court in Queens in 2021.
When she won her election last year, she became the first Haitian American woman to be elected to a State Supreme Court.
She also currently serves as the corresponding secretary for both the Queens County Women's Bar Association and the Macon B. Allen Black Bar Association.
However, Johnson is not the only name on the ballot for surrogate.
At least one other candidate has filed to run for the seat, according to state records.
New York City Civil Court Judge Wendy Li, a Harvard graduate, has filed to run for the seat.
Li was elected to the New York courts in 2018 after a long career in private practice.
Li also served as a board director and secretary of the Asian American Judges Association of New York from 2020 to 2023.
Recently, Li attended a Queens Community Board 1 meeting where she attempted to urge board members and the public to work to bring more translators into the courts.
However, her remarks were mostly shot down by the board’s chair due to rules that maintain the board as an apolitical organization where political candidates aren’t allowed to speak on behalf of their campaign.
The Queens Democratic Party also nominated Queens private attorneys Sharifa Nasser-Cuellar and Amish Doshi to run on their party’s line for Queens Civil Court on Thursday.
Nasser-Cuellar has a private firm located in Forest Hills, and has 18-years of experience and a degree from Albany Law School.
Doshi, works in bankruptcy, business law, real estate law, landlord law and estate planning based out of New Hyde Park in Nassau County.
He is a member of the South Asian Bar Association and graduated from Queens College.
Also running for Civil Court without the Dem’s endorsement is Julie Milner.
Though Milner’s campaign website says that she is running for Civil Court, her filings with the state indicate she is running for Surrogate’s Court, a mistake she told the Eagle will soon be amended.
Her website describes her as a Queens native and an “education scholar, historian and civil rights attorney.”
The website says she attended Long Island University and received a Juris Doctorate from the City University of New York School of Law.
Doshi and Nasser-Cuellar did not respond to phone calls from the Eagle.
The Eagle reached out to both Li and Milner’s campaigns, but did not hear back before press time.
The Queens County Democratic Party did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
