JUDGES GONE WILD
Expanding on an item we reported yesterday, The Daily News cites three examples of judges declining to hear cases in which a State Legislator, or a Legislator’s firm, represents one of the clients, allegedly due to conflict of interest with the judicial pay-raise lawsuit filed recently by Chief Judge Judith Kaye. Most cantankerously, Cattaraugus County Judge Larry Himelein recused himself from a case involving Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s firm, because he thinks Silver is a “slug.” Said Baruch College Public Affairs Prof. Doug Muzzio: “This is like judges gone wild.” According to News, opinions from the State Advisory Committee on Judicial Ethics say it’s “improper” for a judge to recuse him-or-herself from litigation exclusively over the pay issue.

 
NEW FAMILY COURT FIXTURES
The State Assembly’s Judiciary Committee will vote tomorrow on whether to approve a bill that calls for 39 new Family Court judgeships. The bill would introduce seven new judges in each of the next two years in New York City alone. As reported by The New York Law Journal, the bill was drafted amid fears that the highly fraught Family Court system was overburdened, particularly after a surge in neglect and abuse cases precipitated by the 2006 death of Nixzmary Brown. (Last month, Chief Administrative Judge Ann Pfau signed an administrative order capping the caseloads of law guardians at 150.)

 
NIGHTMARE THEATRE
From The Brooklyn Daily Eagle comes word of a guilty verdict handed down by Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Albert Tomei in the bench trial of Christopher Aldorasi. He was a member of the funeral home-based ring that cut up bodies (most notoriously that of former “Masterpiece Theatre” host Alistair Cooke) and sold tissues and bones for use in transplant operations. Aldorasi faces a 60 year max sentence. “The victims of this conspiracy can finally begin to rest in peace, since one more of the monsters who defiled their corpses has been convicted,” said Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes. “This case has brought to light the need for new laws criminalizing misconduct in the funeral-home industry, as well as the tissue-donation industry. It also highlights the need for a felony reckless-endangerment charge that applies to actions demonstrating a depraved indifference to human life. In this case, such a crime would have been charged against the defendants for allowing diseased, or otherwise tainted, tissue to be cleared for transplant into thousands of patients.”

 
“THAT’S NOT JOURNALISM”
And finally, Queens Supreme Court Justice Arthur Cooperman shot back yesterday at members of the media who blitzed his house over the weekend after he acquitted three detectives in the death of Sean Bell. “I resented the fact that people came to my home on the weekend, bothering my neighbors; I'm really very upset about that,” Cooperman told The Daily News. “I haven't accused anyone falsely; I did not spend $4,000 on prostitutes,” Cooperman added, in an apparent reference to disgraced former Governor Eliot Spitzer. “That’s not journalism.”