Opinion

Judges’ jobs injustice

If you’re a New York City judge and get caught breaking court rules, not to worry: The state’s Commission on Judicial Conduct is only too happy to give you a pass.

That’s what the panel proved last week when it let Justice Luis Gonzalez off the hook, scot-free — despite finding, in a lengthy report, that he was a flagrant nepotist who clearly violated the court’s rules.

Indeed, the way Gonzalez — the presiding justice of the Appellate Division’s First Department, covering Manhattan and The Bronx — handed out court jobs, he seemed more like a one-man family-and-friends employment agency than a fair-minded, on-the-merits judge of the court.

Among those who got non-attorney jobs: his ex-wife, his secretary’s brother, his driver’s son and cousin, his executive assistant’s nephew and his previous assistant’s nephew.

It’s a wonder he found time for any judicial matters.

And yet, the complaint against him was dismissed without so much as a reprimand.

Why? Because, the commission found, “hiring for non-lawyer positions at the Appellate Division, First Department, has been a closed process for decades.”

In other words, that’s the way it’s always been done in the First Department — so why hold Gonzalez responsible?

What a pitiful excuse.

Frankly, it speaks volumes about the commission itself — and its relationship to the judges it’s supposed to judge.

Never mind that the report noted that “such a practice undermines the judicial obligation to make appointments based on merit, avoiding favoritism and nepotism.”

And that “it diminishes public confidence in the fairness and impartiality of the courts, even if every person hired for every job was in fact qualified for it.”

(In the case of Gonzalez’s hires, by the way, that wasn’t even always the case.)

Yet the commission practically made the jurist sound a like a hero — saying that “to his credit, Judge Gonzalez has acknowledged shortcomings in the [hiring] protocol . . . and is open to making meaningful change.”

Gee, how swell of him. He and the other appellate justices swiftly adopted the commission’s recommendations.

But none of this should have been necessary. The court’s rules are crystal clear about how employees should be hired — and Gonzalez, like his predecessors, blatantly ignored them.

No one should pretend that any of them are reformers. They made a mockery of the system — and only further eroded public confidence in it.

As for the Commission on Judicial Conduct, its whitewash only reinforces public cynicism about the court.