Opinion ID: 795608
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: The Candidacy of Margarita López Torres

Text: 64 The experiences of plaintiff López Torres illustrate the manner in which the electoral scheme described above operates to exclude challenger candidates, even those with significant public support. Originally backed by the Kings County Democratic Committee, López Torres won election as a Brooklyn Civil Court Judge in 1992. Soon after her election, two high-ranking committee members directed her to hire a person of their choosing as her law secretary. Given the large caseloads that Civil Court judges must manage, the position of law secretary is a significant one. A law secretary conducts legal research, assists in drafting opinions and orders, schedules cases, and conferences with attorneys. 65 The two party leaders who prevailed upon López Torres were Norman, who was the committee's chair and thus the county party's leader, and Assemblymember Vito Lopez, who was a district leader and a member of the county's executive committee. Through Vito Lopez's avid sponsorship, López Torres had secured the county party's support for her successful Civil Court candidacy. 66 Norman and Lopez expressed their directive through a letter authored by the Secretary of the Kings County Democratic Committee. That letter set forth that Clarence and Vito wished the Secretary to refer this wonderful gentleman to you as your Law Secretary and that López Torres should obtain the necessary paperwork for his employment. The resume of the favored appointee was attached. 67 López Torres interviewed the prospect and contacted his prior employer, a Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice for whom the prospect had served as law secretary. The Justice told López Torres that the law secretary's work was mediocre and that he had spent an enormous amount of time on the phone doing political work. López Torres hired someone else instead. 68 An extremely upset Norman later called López Torres and chastised her for refusing the hire. Norman told her that she did not `understand the way it works.' Attorneys such as the one he recommended, he explained, work hard for the Democratic Party's political clubs to get candidates elected and the law secretary job is a way to reward them. He demanded that she fire the person whom she had hired on the merits, and hire a person of the party leadership's choosing. López Torres refused. Some day, Norman warned her, she would want to become a Supreme Court Justice and . . . the party leaders would not forget this. He told her that without the `County's' support, her Supreme Court nomination will not happen. 6 69 Assemblymember Vito Lopez also confronted her. He told her that her refusal to effect the hire was an embarrassment to him because he supported her campaign. He demanded that López Torres make it right by hiring the person referred by `County,' but she again refused. Through an intermediary, he later offered her a chance to redeem herself: if she hired his daughter as her law secretary, he would secure her nomination as the Democratic Party's candidate for Supreme Court Justice. She declined the proposition. 70 As Norman had anticipated, López Torres eventually did aspire to the State Supreme Court bench. She contacted Norman, who requested that they meet at one of Brooklyn's busiest political salt licks, Junior's Restaurant. When López Torres informed Norman that she desired the party's nomination for a vacant Supreme Court Justice position in the Second Judicial District, he predictably declined to support her because her refusal to hire his favored candidate for law secretary was a serious breach of protocol. 71 Nonetheless, she entered her name for consideration at the upcoming judicial convention. In an urgent phone call, Norman demanded that she withdraw. Her continued candidacy, he claimed, was a political affront to him, and running in an open convention was not the way it works. She again rebuffed him. At the convention, not a single delegate proposed her nomination. 72 Undeterred, López Torres sought her party's nomination the following year. The Judicial Screening Committee—a body subject to the control of the county party that ostensibly examines the qualifications of judicial candidates and makes recommendations to the party—interviewed her. However, when she requested the committee's report from Norman and its chairman, Jerome Karp, neither would disclose it. She considered running her own slate of judicial delegates, but realized that such an effort was impossible as a practical matter. There is simply no way I could ever overcome the[] organizational and financial burdens to place delegate candidates on the ballot, she concluded. Without any realistic hope of running her own delegates or receiving Norman's blessing, she withdrew from consideration. 73 Four years later, López Torres yet again sought her party's nomination. Karp informed her that the screening committee would interview only those candidates that Norman referred; Norman, in turn, refused to make the reference. Over the next few months, López Torres pressed Norman for a referral to the committee, but he repeatedly told her that he opposed her candidacy because she had been disloyal. Since she was unable to run her own contingent of delegates and the screening committee would not even evaluate her, López Torres' candidacy effectively ended. 74 That same year, López Torres ran for reelection to the Civil Court bench. The Kings County Democratic Committee—by now overtly hostile to one of its own elected officials—ran a candidate against her in the primary election. Facing the party-backed candidate in an open primary, López Torres prevailed. In the general election, she received over 200,000 votes— more than any of the Democratic candidates for Supreme Court Justice received in Brooklyn that year. 75 In 2003, the persistent López Torres again sought her party's nomination for Supreme Court Justice. This time, Norman agreed to forward her name to the screening committee. Regardless, in a meeting with López Torres on June 6 he declined to support her because of her past defiance. He also stated that she lacked sufficient support. López Torres pointed out that the prior year she defeated the county party's Civil Court candidate in the primary election and garnered more than 200,000 votes to win the general election. Norman responded that County would support only those candidates who supported County in turn. 76 López Torres nonetheless attempted to lobby convention delegates. Beginning in March, she wrote repeatedly to the Kings County Democratic Committee requesting the date, time, and place of the convention; the names of the delegates; and whether she could address the delegates at the convention. In September, the committee's Executive Director, Jeffrey C. Feldman, finally responded. He sneered that a learned jurist, such as yourself, [should] be well aware that [the delegates] stand for independent election in the Primary Election, yet to be held. No list therefore existed anywhere in the world. 77 As to the prospect of addressing the delegates, Feldman wrote: While I am neither an attorney nor a graduate of law school, I suffer from the innocent belief that the floor of the Convention is open, only, to elected Delegates and their successors. I am not aware of any Convention in my thirty (30) years of attendance, which permitted a non-accredited member to be accorded the privilege of the floor . . . . He closed his letter by chastising her for the alleged improper use of a fax machine in violation of Federal Communication Commission regulations. At the convention, two delegates unsuccessfully attempted to nominate López Torres. After that effort failed, the delegates nominated the slate of candidates that Norman had endorsed. 78 Subsequently, a Brooklyn district leader, who also served as a judicial delegate, penned a letter to the county's other district leaders. He wrote that although López Torres was highly qualified, he voted against her nomination because she was an ingrate who had offended party leadership. Her sin, he explained, was that she courted Vito Lopez to support her for Civil Court, but then decided she didn't need him anymore and denied his daughter a job. 79 Years of careful study by a number of groups whose reports were in evidence established that López Torres' experience was no anomalous political mugging. In 2003, New York State's Chief Judge, Judith S. Kaye, created the Commission to Promote Public Confidence in Judicial Elections and charged it with determining ways to improve voter participation in the judicial election process. Chief Judge Kaye named as Chairman John D. Feerick, former Dean of Fordham Law School, and as Commissioners two active state Supreme Court Justices, three active Associate Justices of the Appellate Division, one active state Administrative Judge, and a number of other public servants and private practitioners representing each of the State's judicial districts. After studying the nominating process statewide for more than a year, the Commission concluded that the uncontested evidence before [it] is that across the state, the system for selecting candidates for the Supreme Court vests almost total control in the hands of local political leaders. . . . And in many parts of the State, being on the dominant party's slate is tantamount to winning the election. 80 The Commission is hardly the only entity to reach this conclusion—it merely is the latest. Since 1944 New York's judicial nominating system has been described as exclusionary and boss-dominated; reports and newspaper editorials from that time forward have decried an electoral practice that mocks choice, and criticized a system in which voters can never know the candidates and have to accept party slates, while the real choice is . . . left to political bosses . . . who control nominations. 81 After studying Supreme Court elections for six years, the Fund for Modern Courts concluded that the selection of Supreme Court justices in New York, is, by and large, a process controlled not by the voters but by political leaders. [T]he nomination, not the election, is the lynchpin of the judicial selection process, the Fund set forth. Political leaders, not voters, control judicial conventions and decide who will receive the nomination—and thus who will be the judge. Therefore, it is not the decision of the voters as to the relative merits of judicial candidates, but the relative strength of the political parties in the judicial districts which determines the outcome of these elections. 82 Less than a decade later, a Task Force on Judicial Diversity appointed by then-Governor Mario Cuomo agreed that, In practice it is the political party leaders who have the decisive power to determine who will be nominated. Most often this nomination is tantamount to election. As we all know, the Governor's task force remarked, our system is only nominally one of election.