[Editors note: Welcome to the amNew York Law Bench Report, where we will feature notable rulings from state and federal courts, brief news bulletins that impact the judiciary and announcements from judges’ chambers. Are we missing anything? Contact editor-in-chief Andrew Denney at adenney@schnepsmedia.com]
Judicial conduct commission admonishes town justice for pro-police mailers
The New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct admonished Hyde Park Town Justice Michael Plass for sending out mailers during his judicial campaign conveying the appearance he would be biased in favor of law enforcement, instead of applying the law neutrally, in his rulings.
While campaigning for his seat in 2023, Plass, who served as a Hyde Park police officer and worked at his family’s limousine business for decades, sent out a campaign mailer where he pledged to “keep drug dealers off our streets and out of our hotels, “incarcerate offenders and protect victims of domestic violence,” and “assure repeat offenders are sentenced to the full extent of the law.”
Judicial candidates are prohibited from making pledges or promises regarding their actions if they’re elected in order to promote public confidence, preserve the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary and ensure it does not appear that judges are “pre-judging” cases.
Plass, who is not an attorney and has no education past high school, said he did not know about rules governing judicial campaigning and made his mailers based off of campaigns he’d seen for non-judicial office. During his campaign, the town’s local newspaper ran a story indicating his mailers breached judicial campaign ethics. Plass said he believed it was a political ploy, but created a new mailer without those pledges and sent it out.
After he won his election, Plass took a class presented by the Court Office of Administration on being a judge in December 2023. During an ethics portion of the class, the matter of improper pledges and promises came up. Plass approached the lecturer afterwards and expressed concern that he had acted improperly. The lecturer advised him to send a copy of his mailers to the Advisory Committee on Judicial Ethics, which he did.
The advisory committee sent Plass an advisory opinion in January 2024 advising that his actions disqualified him from judging all criminal cases, cases in any court involving allegations of domestic violence, all vehicle and traffic law matters and cases in any court involving purported drug dealers. This meant that his co-judge, Justice Jean McArthur, had to take on all of those cases herself. Plass asked that the committee reconsider, it didn’t, and he followed their direction until a March 2025 commission hearing on the matter.
In its decision, the commission said that, because they believed Plass “expressed sincere remorse,” trusted that he would learn from this experience and act in accordance with the rules governing judicial conduct going forward, a public admonishment was the proper discipline. The commission ruled he should be able to preside over “a full range,” of cases, including those on criminal, drug and traffic matters, but that he should recuse himself on cases where appropriate, at his discretion.
“Judicial campaign literature must avoid even the appearance of bias or favoritism, and refrain from making pledges or promises about how the judge will rule on matters that may come before the court,” Commission Administrator Robert H. Tembeckjian said in a statement. “The public admonition of Judge Plass for an isolated incident of misconduct frees him to handle his fair share of the court’s caseload.”
Court rules mother was provided with ineffective counsel because attorney didn’t speak with her before hearing
The Court of Appeals found a mother whose attorney didn’t speak with her prior to a fact-finding hearing which terminated her parental rights was provided with ineffective counsel and is entitled to a new hearing, overturning an appellate court decision.
In a Nov. 25, 5-2 ruling, the state’s highest court decided an attorney provided ineffective counsel at a February 2023 hearing by failing to communicate with a mother of twins born in 2020 prior to a hearing where her parenting rights were terminated, during which he requested to remain mute since he hadn’t spoken with her instead of requesting an adjournment.
Writing for the majority, Judge Shirley Troutman acknowledged that while the decision was “based on a cold transcript” and “the mother never complained about the adequacy of her counsel on the record,” she believed the attorney’s failings were so glaring it was clear that the mother didn’t have access to a fair proceeding or the effective assistance of counsel she was entitled to.
“[C]ounsel’s failure to communicate with the mother before the hearing to terminate her parental rights means that counsel necessarily failed to explain the proceedings to the mother, prepare her for testimony, and ascertain her objectives, which undoubtedly impaired her right to a fair proceeding,” Troutman writes. “With so much at stake, counsel could not allow the fact-finding hearing to begin without at least requesting a brief adjournment to discuss the proceeding and its implications with his client.”
At the beginning of the 2023 hearing, the mother, who appeared remotely from the alcohol treatment facility she was enrolled in, told the court she was not open to surrendering parenting rights to her children, who the court determined she had neglected and were in the custody of a foster family. Over the course of the hearing, the court granted the attorney two, five-minute recesses to call the mother. After one of them, the mother decided she would represent herself.
During the hearing, when the mother was told she had an opportunity to testify, she said she did not “understand any of this, so I don’t know what I’m supposed to say and not supposed to say.” Troutman argued this demonstrated the attorney had not properly prepared her.
The dissenting judges, Anthony Cannataro and Michael Garcia, argued that the mother was granted adequate counsel, as the attorney made relevant objections, was granted a five-minute recess to speak with the mother during the hearing after asserting he was at a disadvantage because the two weren’t in the courthouse together and stood by while the mother represented herself.
Writing for the dissent, Cannataro also argued the way the majority came to their decision was incorrect, as there is no way to determine what truly happens between an attorney and client off the record in family court as there is in criminal court, accusing the majority of engaging in “speculation” and “engrafting the criminal standard for reviewing ineffective assistance of counsel claims onto Family Court cases.”
“[Doing so] without the well-established procedural safeguards that are in place in the criminal context, such as a mechanism for ascertaining what may have happened between attorney and client outside the record, is not a workable solution,” Cannataro writes.
Cannataro concluded his dissent with a plea to the legislature to remedy the lack of procedures to determine what happens off the record in family court and create a comparable fact-finding method to that of criminal court.
“Putting aside any disagreement as to the application of the meaningful representation standard in this case, the absence of a mechanism for determining what may have happened off the record leaves parents in termination proceedings, who are statutorily and constitutionally entitled to the effective assistance of counsel, in a sort of due process purgatory,” Cannataro wrote. “[A]lthough the majority deems counsel to have been ineffective under the circumstances presented here, any parent who does not have a record-based claim will be left without a remedy. The legislature should address this inequity in a manner that accommodates both the parents’ right to effective assistance of counsel and the priority of permanency for the children.”
The underlying case is captioned Matter of Parker J. (Beth F.)
