Queens judge recertified despite watchdog’s push for retirement

Queens Supreme Court Justice Michael Aloise was recertified by the Administrative Board of the Courts despite a campaign to force him into retirement. Eagle file photo

By Jacob Kaye

State court officials said this week that Supreme Court Justice Michael Aloise will be allowed to continue serving on the bench despite a push to force him into retirement from a judicial watchdog group.

Aloise, who has been serving as a Supreme Court justice in Queens since 2004, will be allowed to serve an additional two years as a judge after being recertified to the bench by the state’s Administrative Board of the Courts, which is comprised of Chief Judge Rowan Wilson and the Appellate Division's four presiding justices.

Like all justices who hit the mandatory retirement age of 70, Aloise was required to apply for recertification if he had hoped to continue serving as a judge. But unlike most judges, Aloise’s recertification effort was met with pushback from the Center for Community Alternatives, a nonprofit group that in recent years has successfully launched several campaigns aimed at preventing older judges from being recertified.

Nonetheless, the board recently decided to allow Aloise to serve on the bench until he turns 72, when he can again apply for recertification – judges can serve until age 76 if granted recertification.

“We can confirm that Justice Aloise has been recertified,” Office of Court Administration spokesperson Al Baker said in a statement.

Aloise did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

Peter Martin, the director of judicial accountability at the Center for Community Alternatives, said the organization was “deeply disappointed” in the Administrative Board’s choice to recertify Aloise.

CCA in a letter to the board cited dozens of cases Aloise presided over in which the Court of Appeals or Appellate Division, Second Department panels reversed defendants’ convictions due to errors or mishandling by the Queens judge.

“Certification is not an entitlement; it is a discretionary tool meant to relieve caseload pressure without undermining the courts’ integrity or the public’s confidence,” Martin said in a statement. “Certification of Justice Aloise, given his long record of reversals for violations of constitutional rights and legal errors, does the opposite.”

But as the campaign to force Aloise off the bench kicked into gear, so too did an effort to defend him.

Robert Masters, an attorney who briefly worked with Aloise when the pair served in the Queens district attorney’s office several decades ago, told the Eagle on Wednesday that he wasn’t surprised Aloise was recertified because the criticisms against him weren’t entirely accurate.

Masters claimed that because Aloise handled a number of complex felony cases, he naturally was subject to a larger number of appeals.

“I thought [CCA’s] analysis and getting there was not just a mischaracterization, but I think it was very facile in the way that they were approaching it,” Masters said. “I think their basis for doing it and trying to characterize it as being based on competence was not, I think, that sincere.”

“Doing the analysis that they did based on a number of appellate reversals downstream on cases that he handled was inaccurate in light of the fact of the volume of work that he handled, the seriousness of the work that he's handled, the difficulty, the complexity of the work that he handled,” he added. “It only stood to reason that his appellate record may be different from judges who were not handling that steady diet of complicated, difficult, high-stakes work.”

Aloise, a St. John’s University School of Law graduate, spent some of his earliest years in the legal world working under former Queens District Attorney Richard Brown.

He moved to the judiciary when he was elected to the Civil Court in 1999. Five years later, he was elected to the Supreme Court bench and then reelected again in 2017 at the conclusion of his first 14-year term.

Aloise is not the first judge to be called out by CCA.

Most notably, the group was the primary force behind the opposition to Governor Kathy Hochul’s 2022 pick for chief judge, Hector LaSalle.

LaSalle, who leads the Appellate Division, Second Department, would go on to become the first Court of Appeals nominee in New York history to be rejected by the Senate.

CCA also launched a campaign against the recertification of former acting Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Vincent Del Giudice. Like Aloise, Del Giudice had a number of decisions overturned and over 500 years of sentencing reduced by the appeals court.

Shortly after CCA began publicly calling on the Administrative Board to reject his recertification, Del Giudice announced his retirement.