When will criminal and civil trials begin again in New York state?

Not even the state’s chief administrative judge knows for sure.

During legislative budget testimony last week, Assemblyman Andrew Goodell, R-Jamestown, asked Lawrence Marks, chief administrative judge of the state Unified Court System, when the courts may reopen follow the lead of many private sector businesses and reopen for trials.

“The judiciary curtailed many in-person proceedings earlier this year,” Goodell said. “Of course that’s creating even more backlogs and, as you acknowledged in your earlier testimony, the backlog is substantial and growing. One of the largest and most significant backlogs is in the Housing Court because we haven’t had any evictions – now it looks like it will be over a year. My question is at the same time that the court system is closing down in-person proceedings and creating more backlog, virtually every private sector business has been reopening and the court system itself has been giving several decisions striking down regulations that keep the private sector closed. So my question is why are the courts closing to in-person proceedings while the private sector is doing everything it can to open?”

Marks said the analogy to private businesses is comparing apples to oranges because of the sheer number of people the court system deals with every day. There is still at least one grand jury operating in each county, Marks said, even as courts remain closed. The state’s chief administrative judge said the court system will listen to medical experts when making the decision to reopen.

“To suggest that we should, coming out of the second resurgence, go back to normal in person operations is just contrary to the advice of every public health person we’ve talked to, including our own public health experts,” Marks said. “If things continue to improve we will resume jury trials, which are clearly a critical part of the justice system both on the criminal and the civil side. We can’t have a fully functioning court system without jury trials.”

“To some extent it’s what drives the court system because although a very small percentage of cases actually go to trial, the opportunity to try a case is what drives settlements and pleas and other dispositions. We’re entirely guided by public health experts on what they’re saying and advising us. Hopefully we will be able to resume more in-person proceedings.”

Marks testified before legislators that the court system took a 10% cut from Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s budget after it was approved last April, and court officials said they could run the court system on that same amount of money. Even with the cut, the court system budget totals $2.25 billion.

“Our annual budget is overwhelmingly made up of personnel costs,” Marks said. “Nearly 90% of that budget goes to the salaries of judges and nonjudicial staff, along with health, pension, and other fringe benefit costs. It follows that any effort to substantially reduce our spending must entail reductions in such personnel costs.”

When the pandemic hit, the court system froze hiring, which resulted in not filling 730 positions. The court system then chose not to certify 46 judges who had reached the state’s mandatory retirement age of 70 and still wanted to serve. That decision, Marks said, saved $55 million over two years. Keeping the older judges would have meant firing about 325 other employees.

“While institution of the Chief Judge’s Excellence Initiative in recent years has helped the courts to become more efficient than ever before, our short staffing has made it increasingly difficult to conduct the Judiciary’s business in an effective and timely manner,” Marks said. “This can have particular consequences for operations in courts that primarily serve economically disadvantaged litigants, including Family Court and Housing Court.”