ALBANY ALLIANCE
The Albany District Attorney and New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo promised to join forces in tackling corruption yesterday. The Albany Times Union reports that the two offices will share resources and “cross-designate” attorneys and investigators from the state AG with the DA’s Public Integrity Unit. The year-and-a-half old unit now has just three staffers. “This is not the changing of the guard,” Cuomo said. “It's the changing of an era.” Albany DA David Soares ran on a platform two years ago promising not to get entrenched in the political machine. On Thursday he said that he’s made an “effort to pry this office from the hands of those political influences.” The state AG has jurisdiction in civil matters, but only partial jurisdiction in criminal cases.
 
GUARDIAN EN GARDE
Emani Taylor is racking up fees — and she’s not on the receiving end this time. Brooklyn Supreme Court Judge Michael Pesce issued a contempt order nearly a month ago against Taylor, who was the guardian for retired Civil Court Judge John Phillips. Pesce ordered Taylor to turn over all records regarding the contentious guardianship by Dec. 12 and imposed a $1,000 day fine after a weeklong grace period. The current property guardian, James Cahill, wrote in a court filing last October that Taylor had written herself nearly $200,000 in checks from Phillips’s coffers without accounting for the money or getting a court order to take it, and also made “improper” reimbursements” to herself and relatives for $400,000. The $187,000 that Pesce ordered Taylor to return has yet to turn up. Taylor told the New York Law Journal she plans to file court papers Jan. 24 that will show she did not do anything wrong and that she had already produced “most of the required documents” ordered by Pesce.  She says that the judge hasn’t looked at the documents, and said that Pesce “can’t be fair” and should recuse himself.

PIONEER REMEMBERED
In the midst of a discussion about diversity on the bench, it is appropriate to remember former New York Judge Jane Bolin. The nation’s first black female judge died at 98 this week in Queens, according to The New York Times obituary. Sworn in by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia in 1939, Bolin first served on what was then called the Domestic Relations Court. A Yale Law School graduate, Bolin sat on the court for 40 years. The Associated Press reports that “Bolin fought racial discrimination from the bench. She worked to end segregation in child placement facilities and the assignment of probation officers based on race. She also helped to create a racially integrated treatment center for delinquent boys.” Speaking about women’s struggle for equal rights in 1958, Bolin said, “Those gains we have made were never graciously and generously granted. We have had to fight every inch of the way — in the face of sometimes insufferable humiliations.”

CONTRACTUAL APOLOGY
The capital murder trial of Martin Aguilar is winding to a close in Brooklyn federal court this week, and yesterday the previously unemotional defendant told jurors that he regretted his actions. “For a long time, I never saw any wrong in what I was doing," said the 33-year-old Aguilar, who was convicted last month in the contract killing in 2000 of Jose Fernandez. Newsday reminds us that trial evidence showed Fernandez was killed because his wife, Quincy Martinez, wanted to carry on an affair with another man who commissioned Aguilar for the murder. Fernandez was shot twice in the head and his body dumped in a storm sewer at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. “I felt that I was only hurting people who were involved in similar activities that I was involved in. Whether it was drugs, kidnappings, they were doing wrong, just like I was.” Proscutors called the apology a “farce.”