SACRIFICIAL BOSS
A raft of high profile cases are wrapping up or opening up all over the city. Tops for us, of course, is the Brooklyn judge scandal theater. It was time for “bare-knuckled punches” at the start of arguments in the fourth trial of former Brooklyn Democratic Party leader Clarence Norman, Jr. For the extended version of events in court yesterday, check out the New York Law Journal. For a quicker flyover, take a look at the Post. (And, of course, for a deeper look behind the bench in this trial, see our own Jason Boog's current profile of Judge Martin Marcus.) At issue, lest we forget, is whether Norman forced two Democratic candidates, Civil Court Judge Karen Yellen and Housing Court Judge Marcia Sikowitz, in 2002 to use “favored vendors” in their campaigns. A new detail that emerged yesterday from the prosecution: some $9,000 might have gone to a political operative who didn’t render any services at all. Norman’s lawyer, Anthony Ricco, called his client’s actions “smart politics.” There are eight black jurors, reports the NYLJ, and the two judges are white. Ricco has accused the judges of racist tactics in their campaigns. Norman is black and described by Ricco as practicing the politics of “inclusion” — likening his situation to that of Martin Luther King, Jr., when he was imprisoned in Birmingham, Ala. Prosecutors portrayed Norman as the “king of Brooklyn” and a bully who “barked, shouted, and banged the table.” The trial is expected to last a month. If convicted of the top counts, grand larceny by extortion in the third degree, Norman could be sentenced to two to seven years in prison. He’s already been sentenced to two-to-six years for a pair of previous convictions, but is free on bail while an appeal is pending.

ALSO IN BROOKLYN...
In federal court in Brooklyn, jurors began deliberations late yesterday afternoon in the Ronell Wilson capital murder case. Meanwhile, Brooklyn federal Judge Nina Gershon ruled that Israeli victims of sectarian violence could sue the Jordan-based Arab Bank, for allowing relatives of Palestinian suicide bombers to open bank accounts there. Gershon rejected the bank’s assertion that the violence in question does not violate international norms, the New York Sun reports.

DANCER DEATH
With attorneys (finally) present, the trial of Paul Cortez started in Manhattan Supreme Court yesterday. First on the stand was the victim’s father, Jon Woods. He told of how the accused called him shortly before the death of Woods’s daughter Catherine, to warn him that the 21-year-old dancer from Columbus, Ohio was working as a stripper and addicted to drugs. The Daily News reports that “dueling portraits” of Catherine Woods emerged on the first day of Cortez’s trial in Judge Carol Berkman’s courtroom. (Laura Miranda, the lawyer who was held in contempt for not showing up in court last week, is still representing Cortez, as is her earlier co-counsel, Dawn Florio.)

 
BARGAIN BASEMENT BENCH WARMERS
Do part-time judges give part-time justice? That’s what one upstate criminal defense lawyer testified to in hearings on the problems in New York’s town and village courts — many of which are staffed by part-time judges without law degrees. In the second installment in two days on problems plaguing the small-town courts, William Glaberson writes in The New York Times that top court officials will ask the Legislature for at least $50 million to revitalize the ailing town and village court system. That’s more than five times the amount originally discussed. The statewide network includes 1,250 so-called justice courts, whose staff and judges would get better training if the funding goes through. The hearing was called by Senator John DeFrancisco, a Syracuse Republican and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, to explore whether changes should be made to the structure of the justice courts. For their part, the part-times judges asked that the system be kept in place. One justice, Edward G. Van Der Water of Van Buren, NY, said the problems emerged from inadequate budgets and monitoring. “We’ve been struggling for a long time,” he said.