NO NOMINATION FOR CHRISTMAS
After a lot of stalling, talks broke down over Governor George Pataki’s civil confinement bill. Pataki had called lawmakers back to Albany for a special session yesterday to pass a law that would give the state the option to keep violent sex offenders in psychiatric facilities after their prison sentences end. Pataki was making a last ditch effort to get the bill passed during his last two weeks as governor, but the Democrat-controlled Assembly wasn’t having it. The Assembly is set to next meet Jan. 3, when Governor-elect Eliot Spitzer will be in office. When no progress was made on the bill, the Republican-led state Senate responded by not confirming two of the 15 judicial nominees sent to them by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a Democrat. The nominees were Dan Conviser, a state Assembly lawyer, and Elizabeth Foley, director of New York City's Education Departments Office of Special Investigations. Newsday reports that Silver’s spokesman, Charles Carrier, said “talks over the issue unraveled because the Senate bill did not include a provision to track sex offenders who did not meet the criteria for confinement in psychological facilities.”

 
REFORMER UNREFORMED
State Senator Efrain Gonzalez, Jr., inherited a muddy political legacy when he made a first run at the state Senate in 1989 in a special election to fill the seat of Senator Israel Ruiz, who had been convicted of falsifying a bank loan application. But he’s proven he can make his own mark — and not the good kind. Gonzalez siphoned off close to half of a million dollars from a charity that was intended for poor children, according to a new federal indictment covered in The New York Times. Investigators say Gonzalez took the money from Pathways for Youth, Inc., in what the city’s commissioner for the Department of Investigation called a “gross manipulation of elected office.” He directed hundreds of thousands of dollars from the charity through semi-secret “member items.” So where exactly did the money go? (Really, from ex-Tyco International CEO Dennis Kozlowski’s $6,000 shower curtain to Queens Assemblymember Brian McLaughlin’s three homes, we want to know what these guys spend the money on.) Gonzalez allegedly threw $50,000 toward rent for a luxury apartment in the Dominican Republic (for his wife . . . it’s always for the wife . . . lthough there is, unsurprisingly, a girlfriend enmeshed in this tale, too.) Then there is the $9,000 he allegedly spent on a company that produced cigars that appear to have had personalized labels — including “Assembly” and “Speaker.” The Bronx lawmaker, who was elected in a landslide in November, is expected in court tomorrow. Gonzalez was indicted in August for using more than $37,000 from the West Bronx Neighborhood Association to pay his own credit card bills.

APPOINTMENT ATTACK
Pataki tried to rush through a host of his picks for the bench yesterday. This, just after Spitzer accused Pataki of “stacking state offices with appointees who will serve well into the term of the new executives,” John Caher points out in the New York Law Journal. Isn’t that usually what one does in as a spiteful farewell power-grab upon leaving office? On Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved the appointments of Lieutenant Governor Mary Donohue, a former Supreme Court judge, and gubernatorial counsel Richard Platkin for Court of Claims judgeships. The full Senate must approve them. Donohue is perhaps docking for a while on the Court of Claims, awaiting a federal judgeship that’s in limbo with the Democrats poised to take the majority in January in Washington. Also nominated for Court of Claims positions were Appellate Division, Second Department Judge Thomas Adams, who lost his re-election bid this fall, and Inspector General Dineen Ann Riviezzo.

EFFECTIVE NAPPING
Defense lawyer Robert Koppelman might have taken a snooze or two during the racketeering trial of an Albanian gang member, but that didn’t preclude him from providing effective counsel under the Sixth Amendment, according to a federal judge. The Law Journal reports: “In fact, Mr. Koppelman did such an excellent job defending Ljusa Nuculovic, despite falling asleep several times during the 2005 trial, that Southern District Judge Denise Cote felt Mr. Nuculovic was lucky to have him. . . .  During the first part of trial, which was mostly devoted to agent testimony about gambling machines and the agents' surveillance of the organization, ‘it appeared that Koppelman had been sleeping,’ [the judge] said. But Judge Cote said ‘there were others in the courtroom who may also have been tempted to sleep during that time, given the tedium associated with this largely uncontroversial proof.’ ”