BUDGET ONE, JUDGE PAY TWO — HIKE!
The money is in. Among the thousands of pages of Governor Eliot Spitzer’s budget was an allocation of $111 million to provide all state judges with a salary hike retroactive to April 1, 2005. In a registration-free article, the New York Law Journal calls the inclusion of a raise for judges in the executive budget a “bold and apparently unprecedented initiative.” The proposal, which mirrors that of Chief Judge Judith Kaye, will mean a 25-percent increase in salary for judges, who have not had a cost of living increase in eight years. In his commentary on the budget, Spitzer said that that the pay raise came as a “matter of fairness to judges and their families and a matter of public policy,” noting that the cost of living had jumped more than 20 percent, while judicial salaries remained stagnant. (Included in the 25-percent raise is a 2-percent cost of living hike that has to be approved by Congress.) Under the new salary structure, Supreme Court judges are bumped up to $168,000, the same as federal district court judges. Family Court, County Court, and Surrogate’s Court judges will receive 95 percent of the Supreme Court judge’s salary — or about $160,000. New York City Civil and Criminal Court get about $156,000 and City Court judges upstate a little more than $150,000. The Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals gets the most — about $190,000.

COP CON SENTENCED
A cop-turned-con was sentenced yesterday Manhattan federal court to 15 years in prison, Newsday reports. Former New York Police Department officer Porfirio Mejia planned to rob a drug dealer of heroin and nearly half of a million dollars in drug money — while wearing his police shield and carrying a department-issued weapon and bullet-resistant vest. At the sentencing, U.S. District Court Judge Laura Taylor Swain said that as a police officer, Mjia had “betrayed the trust of the community, betrayed the trust bestowed in him by the department and abused his public authority in an effort to enrich himself and his co-conspirators and facilitate the distribution of a large quantity of dangerous drugs.” One of six men to plead guilty in the case, Mejia also received five years’ probation and a $5,000 fine.

OF JURISDICTION AND GEOGRAPHY
A follow-up from Michele Morgan Bolton on the Ronell Wilson verdict in the Albany Times-Union gives  perspective on the death penalty in New York - which has been mostly missing in coverage from recent days. Airing the concerns of critics who said the verdict “springs from a prosecutorial end run” around the June 2004 state Court of Appeals decision that “effectively overturned New York’s death penalty,” Bolton notes the Court of Appeals is expected to revisit the capital punishment issue this year. After the Court of Appeals’ 4-3 decision declared the death penalty unconstitutional, Staten Island District Attorney Daniel M. Donovan Jr. asked the U.S. attorney's office in Brooklyn to take over his case. Critics called it forum shopping and have pledged to try to reverse the verdict. The case could go to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan and, if necessary, to the U.S. Supreme Court, before Wilson would be executed. But a Daily News article this morning says that a lawyer who met with Wilson (not his lead defense attorney Ephraim Savitt) said that he indicated that he does not want to pursue an appeal of the jury’s verdict. Look at the follow-up in The New York Times here, which includes an analysis of where the jurors were from (Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island), giving the case a strong "local connection" — and presumably more resonance than a trial of say, a foreigner tried on terrorism charges.