A THREAT OR A WARNING?
Governor Patterson has some interesting advice to impart to judges who have filed suit over the judicial pay raise quagmire. The Daily News quotes Patterson as saying “I would be a little careful if I were them about slowing down any process. . . . If you slow things down too much, you’re hurting more than just the legislators, you’re hurting your fellow citizens who are just trying to get some relief from the legal system.”

 
“A MATTER OF CONSCIENCE”
Meanwhile, The Times Herald-Record reports that a Goshen-area Town Court Judge made reference to the pay raise lawsuit in a probationary matter in which the defendant law firm’s elder attorney — who is no longer paid by the firm but lends it his image and reputation — is State Senator John Bonacic. Judge Robert Freehill differentiated Bonacic from the lead players in the pay-raise suit — the Senate Majority Leader, the Governor and the Assembly Speaker — and yet added that while the suit goes forward he may recuse himself from hearing any more cases involving Bonacic’s law firm. As Freehill put it, “It’s a matter of conscience.”

MONDAY MORNING LAWYERING
In the aftermath of the contentious Sean Bell verdict, we’re your one-stop place for Monday morning lawyering and analysis. The New York Law Journal has a piece dissecting the advantages for attorneys of non-jury trials, where according to one attorney “. . . the expectation is that [the decision] will be purely on the facts and the law, and that extra-judicial influences will not play a role.” The Daily News weighs in with news of the high security presence staked out at the home of presiding Justice Arthur Cooperman over the weekend, and Newsday reports that the career-defining case will ease Cooperman into retirement. The New York Times has an opinion piece by former NYPD lieutenant Kyle K. Murphy, whose experience as an instructor in the PD’s in-service training unit and various close calls in the field lead him to conclude that “. . . in the end, what they did was not criminal.” The Times also offers a mini-profile of Queens District Attorney Richard Brown as a lens through which to dissect the prosecution’s case, which at least one Queens defense lawyer said “probably shouldn’t ever have been brought to indictment. There was conflict in the testimony, not only internally with each witness, but externally, between the witnesses. Those are the kind of witnesses you put on the stand?”

 
JOINT INCOMPETENCE
From The New York Law Journal comes news of an Appellate Division, First Department decision last week that granted a new trial for a man sentenced to at least seven years in prison as a second felony offender due to joint improprieties by the judge, the prosecutors, and the defense attorney. In People v Raosto, Acting Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Edward J. McLaughlin  improperly interjected himself into the proceedings, the prosecutor’s cross examination was prejudicial and the defense lawyer “displayed general carelessness and inattention throughout the trial,” according to a unanimous appellate panel. “In particular,” the panel wrote, Justice McLaughlin had “conducted lengthy and inappropriate cross-examinations of defendant and defense witnesses, which were neither neutral nor aimed at clarification, but disrupted the flow of testimony and plainly conveyed to the jury the court's disbelief of these witnesses.”

 
AIDS FUNDING REINSTATED 
Finally, Newsday reports that on Friday the Second Circuit overturned a District Court decision and ruled that the United States Department of Health and Human Services cannot cut $1.5 million in AIDS in Suffolk and Nassau Counties. The cuts were made after it was determined that the two counties no longer qualified for top-tier funding under the 1990 Ryan White Act, which provides funds to fight AIDS in localities that are disproportionately affected by the disease. But although Suffolk and Nassau counties haven’t had enough new AIDS cases over the last five years to meet the act’s definition of an “eligible metropolitan area,” the Second Circuit held that a grandfathered clause in the act’s original language nevertheless protected the counties.