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Posted on 08/31/2026 5:36:39 AM PDT by MtnClimber
The mayor’s new judicial panel reveals the radical direction in which New York’s criminal and family courts may be headed.
Last month, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced 18 new appointees to a “revitalized” judicial panel. Known formally as the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on the Judiciary, the panel has a say in who becomes a judge in the city, evaluating and recommending candidates for mayoral appointment to the criminal and family courts, as well as interim appointments to civil courts. Established by Ed Koch in 1978 by executive order—before then, judges were appointed by the mayors themselves, who would often prize political alignment over professional qualifications—the panel is a key player in shaping New York City’s justice system.
Two facts about Mamdani’s picks drew immediate comment. First, there were no Jews. Second, the picks leaned heavily progressive in their judicial outlook.
The former fact, Mamdani insists, was not by design. The latter doubtless was. Several panel members have extensive histories of advancing progressive criminal-justice reforms, prison abolition, alternatives to policing, and various forms of decriminalization. For Mamdani, who bucked the Democratic Socialists of America by publicly distancing himself from the “defund the police” platform, his judicial panel picks suggest a pivot back toward his progressive roots.
“The mayor plainly has a litmus test for his legal appointments: Jewish lawyers aren’t welcome, but the door is wide open for advocates for the most violent radicals,” the New York Post editorial board said of the judicial panel.
Under the guidance of Mamdani’s top legal advisor, Ramzi Kassem, the administration framed the judicial panel selections as representing “the full breadth of the legal community,” including individuals with backgrounds in public defense, criminal-justice reform, and indigent legal services. But a review of past lectures, podcast appearances, and writings by five of the panel’s new members—Julia Hernandez, Amber Baylor, Jared Trujillo, Jill Soffiyah Elijah, and Martin LaFalce—suggests that the mayor is seeking to push the courts toward abolitionist and decarceral strategies.
An outspoken critic of family courts, Julia Hernandez,a law professor and co-director of CUNY’s Family Defense Practicum and Clinic, views the broader American child-welfare system—progressives like her often refer to it as the “family-policing system”—as “a way to control and terrorize politically marginalized communities.” She favors abolishing the system entirely, which she believes is enmeshed in the “web of racial capitalism.”
“Family policing has always served capitalist interests along racial lines, combining the financial imperatives of markets with the moral imprimatur of saving children from their own families,” Hernandez wrote in a 2022 post coauthored with CUNY law professor Tarek Z. Ismail, also codirector of the Family Defense Clinic
Hernandez is an outspoken proponent of “movement lawyering,” a practice where attorneys are not merely their clients’ legal representatives but also agents of social change seeking to “dismantle architectures of subordination.” In line with this, she has called for lawyers to practice “radical early defense,” giving families representation at the onset of an interaction with the child-welfare system, well before a case could advance to family court, with the goal of “restricting or eliminating the state’s coercive encroachment into a family’s life.” She also criticizes traditional legal services as being “divorced from a larger movement” and New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services as an example of “a centuries-old government practice that terrorizes Black and Latino families by taking their children.”
The Mamdani administration’s announcement praised Hernandez for challenging “government surveillance and the separation of families of color and advocates for policies that support family well-being,” as well as her prior work as a family and immigration attorney.
Amber Baylor, a public defender turned law professor and founding director of Columbia Law School’s Criminal Defense Clinic, has called for schools to decriminalize student discipline by adopting a “retroactive and reparations-based redress for the criminalization of students.” Utilizing a reparations framework, which she argues “reposition[s] moral norms,” would expunge records and affirmatively reform the deeper harms of punitive state policies—and thereby serve as a “restoration of stolen opportunity.” Baylor is an adherent of critical race theory in legal education, which allows students to interpret the judicial system through a systemic racial lens.
Jared Trujillo, a CUNY law professor teaching constitutional law and critical race theory, among other subjects, previously served as a senior policy counsel at the New York Civil Liberties Union and president of the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys. He argues that the current criminal legal system is, at its very foundation, “a continuation of slavery” that requires not piecemeal reform but radical alternatives to incarceration and other forms of punishment.
A former “sex worker,” Trujillo has been a staunch advocate for the decriminalization of consensual prostitution. “One of the biggest offenses that I see people arrested for is penal law 240.37, loitering for the purpose of prostitution . . . oftentimes women of color [and] far too often transgender women or non-binary folks,” he said in a 2019 video. “And they’re just existing. They’re waiting for a bus. They’re smoking a cigarette. These folks are picked up. They’re arrested. They’re booked, which can be incredibly humiliating.”
Trujillo has also argued against lengthy prison sentences, which he claims perpetuate multigenerational poverty, and he views mandatory minimum sentences as “the real culprit for mass incarceration in the United States today,” which prosecutors “weaponize” to coerce plea deals. He argues that sentencing reform and shorter sentences can reduce multigenerational poverty.
Jill Soffiyah Elijah, founder and former Executive Director of the Alliance of Families for Justice, is arguably the most prominent figure in the prison abolition movement to be included in the new judicial panel. She has argued that “we need a lobotomy of the American psyche, so that we shift from thinking that we’re better if some people are worse off.” She views the average American as “addicted to punishment” and believes the carceral system makes punishment “as humiliating as possible to destroy people.” Elijah believes that the movement needs to “completely abolish prisons,” which she likens to “weapons of mass destruction,” as irredeemable as slavery.
Elijah has represented and publicly championed incarcerated members of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, including Mumia Abu-Jamal, sentenced to death in 1982 for killing a Philadelphia police officer, whom she has called a “sheer genius” and a “political prisoner.” She was an outspoken advocate of Sundiata Acoli, a member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army sentenced to life in prison for his role in the 1973 murder of two people, including a New Jersey state trooper. She also served as a “legal advisor” for the Venceremos Brigade, has made more than 90 trips to Cuba, and claims that the criminal-justice system in Cuba is preferable to the “classic American approach.”
Martin J. LaFalce, a law professor and director of the Defense and Advocacy Clinic at St. John’s University School of Law, spent 14 years at the Legal Aid Society. The Mamdani administration lauded him for his work representing clients at Rikers Island charged with parole violations.
The son of New York Congressman John LaFalce, he served on the legal team for Naeem Davis, a homeless man charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter in 2012 for pushing Ki-Suck Han into the path of an oncoming subway train following an argument. Davis was acquitted in 2017 after jurors ruled he had acted in self-defense.
LaFalce was one of more than 80 law professors who signed a letter opposing New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s proposed rollbacks of 2020 discovery reforms. The letter argued that scrapping the reforms would give prosecutors an unfair advantage and “reverse the progress New York has made towards transparency,” returning the state “to an era where guilty pleas were secured by coercion, not evidence.”
Yale Law Professor Issa Kohler-Hausmann, author of Misdemeanorland, a 2019 book that scrutinized Broken Windows theory and argued that the “lower reaches of our criminal justice system operate as a form of social control and surveillance,” credited LaFalce as her in-house research expert for the book.
Few, if any, mayoral judicial committees have attracted this much scrutiny or are as skeptical of the criminal-justice system as Mamdani’s judicial panel. If their past statements are any indication, the future of New York City’s court system may soon be ruled over by judges who, like the advisors who recommended them, are more committed to changing the courts than they are to the rule of law. Mamdani may have softened his “defund the police” rhetoric since taking office, but he appears to be letting his judicial panel do the talking for him.
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I guess this is what they voted for.
NYC and London, the Muslim capitols of the West.
Muhammad = Anti-Christ. Islam = Satan’s Fan Clib.
“Two facts about Mamdani’s picks drew immediate comment. First, there were no Jews. “
Yet 30% of Jews who voted last November, voted for this POS....
“heavily progressive” - code words for extreme leftists, probably commies.
“before then, judges were appointed by the mayors themselves, who would often prize political alignment over professional qualifications” And this is different how? Now they prize political alignment over anything else.
A lot of problems would disappear overnight if you just make murder legal for a little while. You don’t have to abolish the whole police force — just the homicide division.
ISLAMamdani and MoFos. Early onset TOTALITARIANISM in America.
The Constitution of the United States no longer covers NYC sharia law and a Mad Man own it now
You knew I was a snake…….
NYers getting what they voted for.
They forgot 9/11
So sad.
Yeah, I know. After 9/11 I gave generously, but if Iran gets a nuclear weapon and targets New York, I won't.
It is absolutely by design.
It is what they voted for. Soon the olly way these NYC judges will sentence a criminal to prison is if they are white.
NYC or Ukraine, same ole; same ole, destroy and control.
Orwell Joined Them, Saw The Plan, And Wrote 1984 To WARN The World
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svPO6ihvgec
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3sE-OIzExkhKVJK35YL_0A
Comments below the video:
“People only need to look at Ukraine to see what’s coming, i.e. cancelled elections, permanently installed dictator figure, not allowed to leave the country especially if you’re of ‘fighting age’ etc. Forever wars pitching people against each other against their wills to kill as many people off as possible. Great discussion Rich.”
Just another reason to avoid NYC and its jurisdiction.
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