Judicial Reports: Car Wars

By Leah Nelson
lnelson@judicialstudies.com 
Posted 07-23-08

One Brooklyn AJ made a parking promise no one has kept. And the current AJ, with a little help from one colleague, seems to have done as much harm as good. What now?

For almost nine years, a feud has smoldered between two battalions of downtown Brooklyn’s fiercest warriors.

The combatants: the Justices of the Kings County Supreme Court at 360 Adams Street and a phalanx of citizen’s groups.

The battlefield: the pedestrian walkway in Columbus Park.

The causus belli: parking.

Citizens say the judges are running roughshod over pedestrian rights merely to preserve a selfish perk. The judges say the citizens don’t understand how seriously their robes are threatened by the mean streets of Brooklyn.

Both sides have rightful claims, and both are filled with a lot of hot air.


The seeds of war were sewn in 1999, when then-Administrative Judge Michael Pesce (who oversaw both the Civil and Criminal Terms of Brooklyn’s Supreme Court) addressed a public hearing on a proposed courthouse that was expected to be finished by 2002. Justice Pesce said that an underground parking lot, which developers said would hold 320 cars, would free up the disputed portion of Columbus Park, which members of the bench had been using to port their cars since the park reopened the mid-1990’s.

The area in question comes in two flavors: A proper parking lot with 50 spaces on what community activists claim is officially designated parkland, and the directly adjacent pedestrian walkway on which judges also park their cars if they can’t find spots in the lot itself.

Though civic groups dispute judges’ right to park on either portion of the land, it is the cars parked on the wide bluestone walkway that enrage them particularly, said Irene Janner of the Brooklyn Heights Association, which has been battling the judges since “the day the construction fences came down [and] the judges’ cars plopped in there.”

That was in 1995. Today, the quarrel has roiled on through several administrative regimes. The Brooklyn Heights Association expected little to come of their objections, Janner said, until Pesce’s promise that the cars would move once the new courthouse and garage were complete.

“You can complain and complain and complain, but how can you fight judges?” Janner said. She also said that Pesce’s comment at the 1999 hearing changed the terms of the dispute. “I don’t know if maybe he was anxious to get everyone to OK the new building, [but he] said ‘Yes, we’ll get out of there.’ ”

Nothing was committed to in writing, but Pesce’s comment, which was duly reported in articles about the hearing, gave the civic groups a new leg to stand on.

The new courthouse and garage were finally completed in 2005, but the judges’ cars didn’t budge from above ground. In October 2006, a spokeswoman for the court said that the new lot contained only 80 spots and was full.

In December of that year, after the Daily News counted 152 on-street spots reserved for what it estimated to be 150 judges, in addition to the 80 spots in the lot beneath the new courthouse and 50 in the disputed parking lot next to the walkway, the judges renewed their promise to vacate the pedestrian walkway.

But again, the cars did not move. And they still haven’t. A variety of excuses have been proffered: The walk from the courthouse to the new garage is too far, there’s no alternative entrance to the lot that would allow cars to avoid driving on the adjacent walkway — and now, security issues.


On the judicial side, the feud was inherited by Justice Abraham Gerges, 74, when he became interim Administrative Judge this Spring. He is a vehement proponent of keeping the parking — all of it — in the name of security.

Personal experience, he said, contributes to his conviction.

Years ago, a man Gerges had sentenced while sitting in the Criminal Term put out a contract on his life. Gerges was under 24-hour guard until the convict was identified.

Separately, the judge was assaulted and mugged (by people who did not realize he was a judge) on Henry Street a few years back. His attackers permanently damaged his left pinkie finger when they tried to pull the ring from it, and left the judge, a Brooklyn native, feeling vulnerable in a way he never used to, he said.

What’s more, earlier this year an angry litigant followed another judge by car from where she had parked to a restaurant, where he accosted her in the parking lot. And another Brooklyn Civil Term Justice, this one from the Matrimonial Part, was recently terrorized by a litigant who threatened the life of the judge’s child.

As Administrative Judge, Gerges says, he is informed of threats against the judges in his court, and it is up to him to decide whether to alert the press about threats. Usually he doesn’t, he said. “There are thousands of threats that are made that you don’t hear about, because we don’t want copy cats.”

The Office of Court Administration tracks reports to its Threat Assessment Unit, and the numbers don’t quite bear out Gerges’ claim of “thousands.” According to Court Spokesman David Bookstaver, in 2005 there were 61 reported threats against New York City judges and 54 against judges outside the city; in 2006, the numbers were 52 and 43 respectively; and in 2007, 71 and 88 respectively.

Not all threats are reported, Dennis W. Quirk, President of the New York State Court Officers Association pointed out. “Judges get threatened every day — it’s a common things that people threaten you,” he said. “Somebody goes and tells their lawyer, ‘I’m going to kick that judge’s ass’ — the lawyer tells the judge — a lot of stuff like that, the judges just ignore.”

To be worth investigating, he continued, a threat has to be “more than somebody who’s just shooting their mouth off.”

Justice Michael Obus, who has been Administrative Judge of Manhattan Supreme Court’s Criminal Term since early 2008, said he couldn’t recall having been told of any threats against judges since taking the administrative position. Moreover, “I don’t believe I’ve ever had a threat leveled against myself, or if I did I didn’t recognize it.”

He did, however, express sympathy for the Brooklyn judges’ worries about security. “I don’t feel that way, but I understand. . . . It’s a legitimate concern; I just don’t have any personal experience of that kind.”

Gerges, who has sat in both terms, avers that judges dealing with the civil side of things are in greater danger from angry litigants than those in the criminal term.

“We are the ones who have to look people in the eyes and say, ‘You’re losing your home, you can have a divorce, you can’t have a divorce,’ ” he said. “The Matrimonial Part is the most difficult part. Defendants in a criminal case don’t go after the judge — they go after the District Attorney.”


Wiley Norvell of Transportation Alternatives, finds Gerges’s reasoning specious. “We respect the security concern; Judge Gerges raised it to me,” he said. “But of course, we’ve been given about five different reasons in the past years as to why that lot is necessary, in various orders — this is just the most recent one. So we sort of take this with a grain of salt.”

To strengthen his case, Gerges cites a 2005 report from the Unified Court System’s Task Force on Court Security. Among the “especially important” recommendations for improving security is “Situating judges’ parking to provide direct access to the judges’ entrance to the courthouse.”

And among the State’s statutory guidelines for State Court facilities is the sentence “If car parking provisions are possible judges’ parking should be so planned as to provide adequate security and direct access to the judges’ entrance of the courthouse.”

Gerges invited Federal Marshals to conduct an official review of the area. Judicial Reports was given exclusive access to their report. The following is an excerpt:

“With the sizeable contingent of judges at this facility, the potentially volatile proceedings they preside over, and contraband issues, there is reasonable justification for protection outside the facility.”

The marshals also noted that newly constructed federal courthouses must have parking underground or directly adjacent.

Dennis Quirk of the Court Officers Association says all other courthouses in the city have parking right outside their doors, and that court officers greet judges at their cars and escort them inside. In terms of the Brooklyn judges’s concerns, “It’s not the walk, it’s what happens when they leave the court at 6:00 at night,” he said. “Walking that two-and-half blocks could create problems.”

Brooklyn Civil Term Justice Herbert Kramer, whose March statement that the judges are hoping to work things out but were “preparing a lawsuit,” elaborated. His main concern is that, if forced to park their cars in the garage below the court on Jay Street, judges would have to follow the same path every day, making them potential targets for anyone who learns their routine. “This obviously is, has been, and always was a security issue for the judges,” Kramer said.

Irene Janner at the Brooklyn Heights Association doesn’t buy the security argument. “Judges not only plop their cars, but they have armed guards, officers, police [patrolling the lot] so pedestrians are relegated to a skinny little sidewalk,” she said. “They claim the need for security. I don’t know if they need such security, when some of them walk to work or take the subway and go out to lunch on Montague Street in a flock.”

Kramer, who eats lunch in chambers, said that the difference is that there is no predictable pattern to judges’ lunch behavior — and Quirk pointed out that walking to a garage at the end of the day is different. “It’s like anything — if you’re looking for someone, here’s your opportunity to get them,” Quirk said.

Janner is a retired IRS agent who personally delivered bad news to many people while on the job and was at times the object of their rage. “But nobody ever gave me parking for it,” she says.


In recent months, the City has been pushing a compromise in which judges would keep the parking lot but be barred from parking on the walkway next to it. For a time, both sides seemed close to accepting the deal — until Kramer said the word “lawsuit” in March.

In July, Gerges told Judicial Reports that there will be no lawsuit. Justice Kramer said there is no “pending” litigation. But with tempers flaring on both sides, entente seems more distant than ever.

Both sides claim that history is on their side.

Gerges acknowledges that the area where the cars are parked was designated parkland decades ago, but that it has always been used for parking. He buttresses his assertion with photos from as early as 1920 showing cars parked beneath the El, and with a 1981 architectural map designating the disputed area as parking.

Gerges also notes that, when he was a City Councilman representing downtown Brooklyn, he and then-Administrative Judge Pesce lobbied the City to clean up and refurbish the park area. “And do you know what the ironic part is? I named the park.”

Janner says that doesn’t matter. “This all goes back to when the El was there and it was just a hodgepodge,” Janner said. People parked there, she acknowledges, “but who cared? It wasn’t an attractive place.”

Now, she says, the new design is supposed to create “grand” walkway and gathering place.

Gerges is arranging roundtable discussions with community organizations and sending a letter to community boards to explain how judges make decisions “[s]o the public understands what the courthouse is about,” he said.

He added, “I’m using my skills as a City Councilman, and it’s really making people feel good.”


But for all his efforts at diplomacy, Gerges has made some serious strategic gaffes. In June, he told Brooklyn Law School Dean Joan Wexler that students and faculty could park in the judges’ lot (not on the walkway next to it) for free on evenings and weekends, when the judges are not there.

Given the shortage of on-street parking in the area, he told Judicial Reports, “To me it was a no-brainer.”

Not everyone saw it that way. “This is just adding insult to injury,” Transit Alternatives’ Norvell said at the time. Transit Alternative’s main mission — shared to some degree by most of downtown Brooklyn’s civic groups — is to reduce car traffic in the city. Expanded use of the lot is problematic, Norvell explained, because “it is a magnet for parking abuse. . . . Once you give someone that parking entitlement, it tends to erode their appreciation for public space.”

Added Janner, “It’s not even [Gerges’s] land to give away.”

She also bristled at the judge’s outreach. “We’re not strangers to what the courts do. We just don’t want their cars in our parks.”

For a fresh perspective on this partisan stalemate, Judicial Reports turned to retired judge Stephen Crane, who was Administrative Judge of Manhattan’s Supreme Court, Civil Term, from 1996 to 2001.

He was surprised that the issue of parking in Brooklyn had been taken up by the judges. Pointing out that no matter how the land is used, the City owns it, Crane said, “It’s hardly up to the Administrative Judge to weigh in, except to speak up in the interest of the judges.” In terms of security, he said, “I’ve seen judges in [both terms] who were the subject of individual threats.”

Though he recalls receiving two pieces of hate mail during his career, Crane was never himself the subject of a threat to his person. He traveled to and from work by subway. “I never felt ill at ease or unsafe. Whether it’s a safety issue in some boroughs, and it may be, or whether it’s a convenience issue, judges have always had accommodations.”


Judge Gerges still hopes he can persuade civic groups to see things from his perspective.

“I think the issue is so simple,” he says. “Why doesn’t the City come in here with the police department and do an analysis from a security point of view – not a judge point of view or a parks points of view – and tell us that we’re wrong?”

Since both sides already think they know the answer to that question, a third opinion just might help.


Posted by Jason on July 22, 2008 05:52 PM to Judicial Reports