ANOTHER CENSURE FOR HART 
The Commission on Judicial Conduct voted 8-1 yesterday to censure Queens Supreme Court Justice Duane A. Hart. It was the second such reprimand for Hart, who in 2005 was censured for improperly holding a litigant in contempt. (And it could have been worse — the commission’s counsel, Robert H. Tembeckjian, had recommended that Hart be removed from the bench.) This time around, Hart's follies included threatening an attorney with contempt, presiding over a case in which he had a relationship with an attorney, denying an attorney’s request to make a record, and offering to testify on an attorney’s behalf in a disciplinary matter if the attorney testified for him before the commission (all of which predated his prior censure). As reported by The New York Law Journal yesterday, Hart said that all of the attorneys who testified against him were “liars and thieves,” and yet “the commission found them credible. . . . This is the sum and the substance of the case against me.” Hart, who is black, had also accused the panel of not believing any of the seven black witnesses; in 2007, he attempted to stay the commission/s case due to what he called chairman Raoul Felder’s “racial bias.” Tembeckjian responded: “If Judge Hart is dissatisfied with the commission's censure, the appropriate course is to seek Court of Appeals review, not besmirch the honorable men and women who testified against him or unjustifiably read race into the referee's decision.”

THE NYPD'S "CULTURE OF RETALIATION" 
An Egyptian-born corrections officer who worked as an antiterrorism officer for the NYPD has added a new charge in his bias case against the city — he says police have retaliated for his suit (which was filed in 2006), by yanking him from his undercover assignment and transferring him “back to a dead-end position” with the Department of Correction. The New York Times has the story. Originally, the unnamed defendant had sued the city for what he alleged were racist emails sent to the unit by another antiterrorism employee, some of which made statements such as, “Burning the hate-filled Koran should be viewed as a public service,” and, “This is not a war against terrorism, it is a war against Islam.” Of the new charges, which were filed before Southern District Judge Barbara S. Jones, the defendant’s attorney Ilann M. Maazel said, “There is a culture of retaliation within the NYPD. The plaintiff was performing extremely important work, he was very good at it, and this demotion is a loss to the city.”

FAKE JUDGES, REAL GRIEVANCE 
From The Daily News comes word of a protest yesterday over the squabble about parking spaces for judges in downtown Brooklyn. Members of the group Transportation Alternatives donned fake judges’ robes and mocked the jurists for refusing to give up their parking spaces in Columbus Park and move to an underground garage at the new courthouse two blocks away at 330 Jay St. “Two blocks is too far!” the hecklers yelled. TA spokesman Wiley Norvell said the protest was designed to “show how absurd and petty the judiciary is being about their parking privilege. To contend that a pedestrian plaza can and should be a parking lot for judges is unconscionable.”

SCHOOL'S OUT
AM New York reports that a federal appeals court ruled that New York City could continue its search for a principal to replace the controversial head of an Arabic-themed school. Debbie Almontaser was fired from the new Khalil Gibran International Academy after discussing the word "intifada" in an interview. While the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with federal judge Sidney H. Stein's decision not to compel the city to stop the job search, the appellate decision noted that the former administrator could still proceed with another legal question: "whether a public employee, who is required by her employer to speak to the press as a condition of her employment, may be sanctioned for speaking accurately when her statement is, as her employer knows, inaccurately reported and then misconstrued by the press."

LANDMARKS AND EARMARKS 
The New York Times’ City Room blog has two interesting stories. First, the blog reports that the order by Southern District Judge Jed S. Rakoff earlier this week for the governments of Mongolia, India, and the Philippines to pay $58 million in diplomat-related property taxes has prompted a legislative response. Staten Island Congressman Vito J. Fossella (R) says he will introduce a bill that would deduct 110 percent of the amount of property taxes and parking fines owed by any nation from its foreign aid. “Our laws apply equally to all people, regardless of whether the individual is a diplomat, a schoolteacher or a construction worker,” said Fossella. “As the city struggles to close a budget gap, I believe this money could go a long way to reducing the tax burden on New Yorkers, enhancing our senior centers, improving our parks and upgrading our schools.”

Finally, City Room also reports that the city has filed a lawsuit against the owners of the Windermere, a once illustrious and now decrepit Hell's Kitchen apartment building, demanding that they pay a fine of $5000 per day until repairs begin on the 128-year-old Queen Ann-style building, which in its heyday had “hall boys” to serve tenants and modern technology like a hydraulic elevator and a telephone. Ironically, the last hold-out tenants of Windermere — which received landmark protection in 2005 — were evicted by a judge last year, who said the building was too dangerous to inhabit. “City laws require that owners of landmarked buildings keep them in a state of good repair to prevent architectural integrity from being compromised and to prevent intentional ‘demolition by neglect,’” the city said in a statement.