September 25, 2006
The large abuses of tiny courts ::
legal — tagged crime, due process, legal, new york and social conscience
7:56 am
The New York Times has an interesting piece on the small, rather unceremonious courts of limited jurisdiction in New York State and the types of abuses that go on there. Since these courts lack the high profile of general jurisdiction courts and often have people substantially less qualified presiding over them, they do not get the same level of attention as the Supreme Court of New York. The article, noting first that “[n]early three-quarters of the judges are not lawyers…have scant grasp of the most basic legal principles, [and] never got through high school,” goes on to explain why the underqualified nature of these judges is such a Big Deal:
But serious things happen in these little rooms all over New York State. People have been sent to jail without a guilty plea or a trial, or tossed from their homes without a proper proceeding. In violation of the law, defendants have been refused lawyers, or sentenced to weeks in jail because they cannot pay a fine. Frightened women have been denied protection from abuse.
Given the lack of attention that these courts garner (who really cares how your challenge to that traffic ticket was resolved?) what springs to mind for me is the dialogue between Holmes and Watson in The Adventure of the Copper Beeches, in which Holmes notes that it is places isolated from greater society and hidden from public scrutiny that are ripest for abuses and crime:
But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser.
