Justice in USA : Franklin County is bigger than Rhode Island. But it has only one higher court judge, in the county court in Malone. So the part-time town and village justices — plumbers, meat cutters and school bus drivers — are often the last word on the law here, with the power to issue search warrants, conduct trials, put some people in jail and let friends go free.
“The reality is, you basically have to have no qualifications other than be a voter to put someone in jail, and that’s a very alarming situation,” Mr. Champagne said. “To throw a layperson — some of whom don’t have a high school degree — in that position is just a recipe for disaster.”
A Night in Court
“Town of Duane Justice Court is now in session,” Justice Gori announced.
Four bare fluorescent bulbs provided the only light in the roughly finished meeting room that becomes a court every few weeks. There was a portable bar against one wall, and a glimpse of the firehouse kitchen, with its jumble of old soda bottles and coffeepots. The American flag tacked to the wall had to be pulled back to allow the judge to get at the thermostat on this icy winter night.
At two pushed-together folding tables sat a nervous teenager, in court to answer speeding tickets, next to his clench-jawed father. A state trooper, there as chief witness against the teenager, doubled as the court security officer.
And behind a battered wooden desk was Justice Gori. Fleshy, with eyes that water at sentimental moments, he was wearing an open brown shirt, his T-shirt visible at the neck.
The court computer that he bought with his own money was at home; it took him two months to figure out how to turn the thing on, he said. He had no judge’s robe. They are too expensive, he said. His judicial salary is $3,750 a year.
“There are certain things that are lacking,” he said.
He moved to Duane, population 159, from Saratoga County in his 40’s after a divorce, enticed by the chance to hunt with his dogs.
“Maybe it’s the solitude,” said Justice Gori, who has since remarried. “You get up here at night, when the highway quiets down, you don’t hear anything.”
Yet people cross paths in Franklin County in unlikely and sometimes volatile ways: Mohawk Indians, the owners of lavish new vacation homes, Adirondack tourists and fishermen, and others who cross the border on less savory business. Drugs and domestic violence seem to be on the rise, and state prisons are big employers.
When Justice Gori moved here about 20 years ago, the prison construction boom offered jobs. After years as a dog trainer, “I picked up my tools and went back to the bricklaying, mason trade,” he said.
Like a lot of newcomers to small towns, he wanted to get involved. But he didn’t like the sight of blood, so that ruled out volunteer firefighting. He was attracted instead to the court in the weathered firehouse. “Law has always been kind of an interesting thing to me,” he said.
That interest, however, does not include a fascination with the technicalities that occupy lawyers. “If you look at the laws, it’s all common sense,” he said.
Most of his work, since his first election in 1997, has been traffic cases. If there were many serious crimes in Duane, he said, they may have gone unnoticed out in the vast Adirondack nights. “Either we’re a nice, quiet town or two people duked it out and one won and one lost, they got up and shook hands and nobody knows about it,” he said.
There have been a handful of serious cases, the first phases of some felony prosecutions. Once, state troopers tracked him down on a bricklaying job. They said a local man was growing marijuana, and wanted a warrant to search his property. In the dust and cement, it fell to William Gori, dog trainer and mason, to put aside his tools and measure the rights guaranteed under the Constitution. “I sat down,” he said. “Read everything. Looked at all the pictures.” The troopers got their warrant.
In the makeshift courtroom on this winter night, he was warmly sympathetic to a woman who had forgotten to put the registration sticker on her windshield. Case dismissed.
The other case that drew the attention of the Commission on Judicial Conduct involved Lucille K. Millett, a Mohawk woman from the reservation that straddles the county’s border with Canada. She was outside the Duane court one night in 2004 waiting for her sister, whom she had driven there for a traffic case. Justice Gori summoned Ms. Millett inside, asked for her driver’s license and called the state police to run it through their computer.
In an interview, Ms. Millett said she was frightened and embarrassed; no one else was asked for a license. The only sense the sisters could make of it, she said, was that they were the only American Indians in court.
She filed a complaint with the commission, which ruled last year that Justice Gori had no right to demand anything of someone outside his court who faced no charges.
Asked about the case, Justice Gori denied that he harbored any prejudice. He said he thought he was acting within his authority.
“You learn by mistakes,” he said. “They say this is improper, I don’t do it again.”
It is a measure of his isolation that his disciplinary hearings have been among the few times he has had a chance to rub shoulders with the larger legal world. He attends the refresher course each year. But he said the town could not afford to send him to the annual state magistrates’ convention, held last year in Niagara Falls, nor could he pay for the trip himself.
Still, he is convinced that he and the other justices across New York are honest people trying to do right. “Economicswise,” he added, “you couldn’t get the job done any cheaper.”
A County at the Edges
The troubles of Mr. Gori and his fellow justices are nothing new. In 1973, the State Commission of Investigation arrived in the Franklin County village of Saranac Lake to examine the work of one justice, a maintenance worker and vacuum-cleaner salesman, whose “inept and mangled handling,” it said, had bungled a felony grand larceny case.
What investigators found alarmed them. Money was missing. Records were sloppy. A pile of cash from fines sat in an unlocked drawer. The justice’s relationship with the police seemed far too close, and one of his law books was 44 years old.
Astonished, the investigators widened their inquiry to include all the justice courts in the county and then expanded it across New York. Calling for statewide reform, they concluded that “such deficiencies and ineptitude” in the justice courts “simply must not be tolerated.”
But little seems to have changed in Franklin County’s justice courts since then.
Last November, one longtime village justice, Roy H. Kristoffersen, a salesman, resigned after officials began investigating charges, which he denied, that he “rendered favorable dispositions” for the son of the other village justice — in Saranac Lake, the same place that touched off the investigation 33 years ago.
Another justice, Marie A. Cook, a school-bus driver who is still on the town bench in Chateaugay, not only fixed a speeding ticket at the request of a fellow justice, but she was so oblivious to ethical rules, the commission said last fall, that she made an official record of the fix: “Reduced in the interest of Justice Danny LaClair.”
Yet another, the town justice who released a rape suspect on bail as a favor to a friend, tried to explain things to the commission: “Maybe you are not familiar with what goes on in the North Country, but we are all more or less friends up there.”
Such cases may only hint at the dimensions of the problem in Franklin’s courts. A review for this article of rarely seen appeals files in Franklin County Court showed a disturbing trail of legal blunders and judicial ignorance over the last five years.
One justice seemed not to fully understand that criminal charges must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt, wrote the county court judge, Robert G. Main Jr. Another justice skipped over the matter of the constitutional guarantee of a lawyer. Immediately after a woman charged with fraud said she could not afford an attorney, Judge Main said, the village justice took her guilty plea instead of appointing a lawyer.
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And so Justice Gori is working his way through a third four-year term, learning the job as he goes. He does not appear to share his lawyer’s disdain for how the justice courts are run.
“I really feel the justice courts are the courts closest to the people,” he said, and being a lawyer might interfere with that. “At times, lawyers get hung up in certain things, so that maybe you wouldn’t get true justice in certain cases.”
But a state police report from last year suggested that in Duane, true justice — and empathy for the people — might be works in progress.
It seems that Brandon L. Lucas, a scrawny 19-year-old from the next county, was trying to pay a ticket he had received in Duane for fishing with the wrong kind of bait. Since the firehouse court was empty, as it often is, Mr. Lucas went down the road to Justice Gori’s house.
Soon, Mr. Lucas was in the back of a state trooper’s car in handcuffs, and in tears. An angry Justice Gori had berated him and called the police, the young man recalled when a reporter tracked him down. He had evidently not seen the sign on the judge’s garage: “If you proceed past this point, you are subject to various trespass rules and regulations.”
The district attorney decided not to prosecute. And Mr. Lucas made his own decision about wandering into the jurisdiction of Duane Town Court: Don’t.
“I’ll never go fishing up there again,” he said.
nytimes.com |
