11/28/2006 04:12 PMIn Tiny Courts of New York, Abuses of Law and Power - New York TimesPage 1 of 10http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=FB0C11FF34550C768EDDA00894DE404482September 25, 2006In Tiny Courts of New York, Abuses of Law and PowerBy WILLIAM GLABERSON; JO CRAVEN MCGINTY CONTRIBUTED REPORTING.Some of the courtrooms are not even courtrooms: tiny offices or basement rooms without a judge's bench or jury box.Sometimes the public is not admitted, witnesses are not sworn to tell the truth, and there is no word-for-word recordof the proceedings.Nearly three-quarters of the judges are not lawyers, and many -- truck drivers, sewer workers or laborers -- havescant grasp of the most basic legal principles. Some never got through high school, and at least one went no furtherthan grade school.But serious things happen in these little rooms all over New York State. People have been sent to jail without a guiltyplea or a trial, or tossed from their homes without a proper proceeding. In violation of the law, defendants have beenrefused lawyers, or sentenced to weeks in jail because they cannot pay a fine. Frightened women have been deniedprotection from abuse.These are New York's town and village courts, or justice courts, as the 1,250 of them are widely known. In the publicimagination, they are quaint holdovers from a bygone era, handling nothing weightier than traffic tickets and smallclaims. They get a roll of the eyes from lawyers who amuse one another with tales of incompetent small-townjustices.A woman in Malone, N.Y., was not amused. A mother of four, she went to court in that North Country villageseeking an order of protection against her husband, who the police said had choked her, kicked her in the stomachand threatened to kill her. The justice, Donald R. Roberts, a former state trooper with a high school diploma, not onlyrefused, according to state officials, but later told the court clerk, ''Every woman needs a good pounding every nowand then.''A black soldier charged in a bar fight near Fort Drum became alarmed when his accuser described him in court as''that colored man.'' But the village justice, Charles A. Pennington, a boat hauler and a high school graduate, deniedhis objections and later convicted him. ''You know,'' the justice said, ''I could understand if he would have called youa Negro, or he had called you a nigger.''And several people in the small town of Dannemora were intimidated by their longtime justice, Thomas R. Buckley,a phone-company repairman who cursed at defendants and jailed them without bail or a trial, state disciplinaryofficials found. Feuding with a neighbor over her dog's running loose, he threatened to jail her and ordered the dogkilled.''I just follow my own common sense,'' Mr. Buckley, in an interview, said of his 13 years on the bench. ''And the hellwith the law.''The New York Times spent a year examining the life and history of this largely hidden world, a constellation of1,971 part-time justices, from the suburbs of New York City to the farm towns near Niagara Falls.It is impossible to say just how many of those justices are ill-informed or abusive. Officially a part of the state courtsystem, yet financed by the towns and villages, the justice courts are essentially unsupervised by either. State court11/28/2006 04:12 PMIn Tiny Courts of New York, Abuses of Law and Power - New York TimesPage 2 of 10http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=FB0C11FF34550C768EDDA00894DE404482officials know little about the justices, and cannot reliably say how many cases they handle or how many areappealed. Even the agency charged with disciplining them, the State Commission on Judicial Conduct, is notequipped to fully police their vast numbers.But The Times reviewed public documents dating back decades and, unannounced, visited courts in every part of thestate. It examined records of closed disciplinary hearings. It tracked down defendants, and interviewed prosecutorsand defense lawyers, plaintiffs and bystanders.The examination found overwhelming evidence that decade after decade and up to this day, people have often beendenied fundamental legal rights. Defendants have been jailed illegally. Others have been subjected to racial andsexual bigotry so explicit it seems to come from some other place and time. People have been denied the right to atrial, an impartial judge and the presumption of innocence.In 2003 alone, justices disciplined by the state included one in Montgomery County who had closed his court to thepublic and let prosecutors run the proceedings during 20 years in office. Another, in Westchester County, had warnedthe police not to arrest his political cronies for drunken driving, and asked a Lebanese-American with a parkingticket if she was a terrorist. A third, in Delaware County, had been convicted of having sex with a mentally retardedwoman in his care.New York is one of about 30 states that still rely on these kinds of local judges, descendants of the justices who keptthe peace in Colonial days, when lawyers were scarce. Many states, alarmed by mistakes and abuse, have moved inrecent decades to rein in their authority or require more training. Some, from Delaware to California, haveoverhauled the courts, scrapped them entirely or required that local judges be lawyers.But New York has no such requirement. It demands more schooling for licensed manicurists and hair stylists.And it has left its justices with the same powers -- more than in many states -- even though governors, blue-ribboncommissions and others have been denouncing the courts as outdated and unjust since as far back as 1908, when ajustice in Westchester County set up a roadside speed trap, fining drivers for whatever cash they were carrying.Nearly a century later, a 76-year-old Elmira man who contested a speeding ticket in Newfield, outside Ithaca, wasjailed without even a warning for three days in 2003 because he called the sheriff's deputy a liar.''I thought, this is not America,'' said the man, Michael J. Pronti, who spent two years and $8,000 before a stateappeals court ruled that he had been improperly jailed. 'Justice in the Dark' It is tempting to view the justice courts as weak and inconsequential because the bulk of their business is trafficviolations. Yet among their 2.2 million cases, the courts handle more than 300,000 criminal matters a year. Justicescan impose jail sentences of up to two years. Even in the smallest cases, some have