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So I’ve been looking at Wikipedia, trying to figure out New York’s judicial system. It seems that Mayor Bloomberg appointed Merchan to be a Family Court (a lower court) judge in 2006. NYC doesn’t have enough judges/justices for all their cases so they grab whatever judges they can and make them “acting justices” for their trial courts (which they call “supreme courts”). That’s what happened with Merchan in 2009. An administrative judge took him from his role in the lower-level family court and made him into an “acting justice” in the supreme court, criminal division. Normally supreme court justices (normal trial judges) are elected, but because Merchan is only an ACTING justice he has never had to be elected.

So that’s the difference between a justice and an acting justice.

I’m seeing a document from the NYC Bar Association in 2002 that is arguing that assignments of judges should be random. See https://www.nycbar.org/reports/the-assignment-of-judges-in-the-criminal-term-of-the-supreme-court-in-new-york-county/

The argument they made is that it is not fair to automatically assign a judge involved in a grand jury to also be assigned the judge for all the indictments that come out of that grand jury. (The “Challenged Policy”) They not only pointed out that such a policy is against the express rules and exceptions, but also stated why: the “Challenged Rule” gives any one judge too much power and it breeds distrust.

And their point is well-taken in the Trump case because there was only an indictment because Merchan didn’t require Alvin Bragg to give exculpatory evidence, and allowed him to lie about what evidence he had, if I’m understanding correctly. So the same corrupt judge that allowed the indictment to be gotten through prosecutorial fraud was also the corrupt judge who oversaw the criminal trial.

But apparently nothing came of the NYC Bar’s recommendations because this is the response to Stefanik’s complaint to the NY Unified Judicial System inspector general regarding the apparent non-randomness of the assignment:

““As we’ve said repeatedly, including in April 2023, Judge Merchan was assigned to supervise the special grand juries that investigated the Trump Organization and Allen Weisselberg as well as Donald Trump. He was, in turn, assigned the indictments that arose from those investigations, which is common practice since the judge supervising the grand jury investigation already has some familiarity with these often-complex cases and can manage them more efficiently,” OCA spokesperson Al Baker said in a statement. (see https://nypost.com/2024/05/28/us-news/elise-stefanik-files-misconduct-complaint-against-judge-juan-merchan-over-random-assignment-to-trumps-trial/ ).

So they are not even pretending that Merchan got these cases randomly, even though the NYC Bar Association notified them 22 years ago that the policy they just used to “get Trump” was against the rules.

From the NYC Bar document:

“Since the adoption of the Uniform Rules for Courts Exercising Criminal Jurisdiction more than a decade ago, the principle that judges in criminal cases should be selected randomly has been firmly embedded in the criminal justice system. Rule 200.11 of the Uniform Rules governs judicial assignments of criminal cases in superior courts. Rule 200.11(c) provides that subject to certain carefully defined exceptions described below, each criminal action “”shall be assigned to a judge by the clerk of the court in which it is pending pursuant to a method of random selection authorized by the Chief Administrator.”” 22 NYCRR § 200.11(c).” (and they went on to point out what the exceptions are, and they don’t include that a grand jury judge should hear all the indictments coming out of the grand jury).

So basically, in this document there are a whole bunch of names of NY lawyers who have already expressed the same outrage as Stefanik is expressing now. The NY court is not even pretending to obey the rules.

The question is whether the inspector general will do anything about it.