gavel-legal Photo: Shutterstock.com

An attorney from Western New York who had served as a town justice in Chautauqua County for almost three decades has resigned after a complaint alleged he consistently failed to file certain mandated reports with the state and did not use technology at the court, including his email account.

Bruce Scolton, a name partner at Erickson Webb Scolton & Hadju in the Jamestown area, will leave his post as court justice in the town of Harmony at the end of the month and has agreed to never seek judicial office again, according to the State Commission on Judicial Conduct.

Scolton was facing three official charges from the commission when he tendered his resignation in late November.

The first charge alleged that Scolton was frequently late in filing reports to the Office of the State Comptroller for about three-and-a-half years. Town and village court justices are required by law to report the amount of funds the court receives to the state comptroller by the tenth day of each month. They also have to remit those funds to the municipality by that time.

According to the commission, Scolton was charged with filing those reports late each month between January 2015 and July 2018 with the exception of six months. The reports were often sent months after they were due and Scolton's salary as town justice was frequently paused while the state waited for the filings.

It was not the first time he's been accused of filing those reports late. Scolton received two letters of dismissal and caution for failing to file those reports—one in 1998 and another in 2000. He was also admonished by the commission for delaying the disposition of six small claims cases in 2007, the commission said.

The second charge referred to conduct spanning nearly his entire tenure as town justice, according to the commission. Since 1991, according to the complaint, Scolton had not ensured that the court's staff was notifying the state Department of Motor Vehicles about the status of 2,612 vehicle and traffic cases. Those cases involved individuals who had either been convicted of a violation, failed to pay a fine or respond to the charge.

Instead, according to the commission, Scolton notified the DMV of those cases by sending documents of his own design to the agency, which it said it did not recognize and could not accept. He continued to send his own forms to the DMV despite being told by the agency that it did not recognize the cases as being disposed, the commission said.

The third charge alleged that Scolton did not use his court email account for more than three years, from January 2015 to May 2018. The complaint also alleged that Scolton had not activated or used a computer that was provided to him by a grant from the Office of Court Administration in mid-2017. He had also failed to install certain court-related software on the computer.

That apparently meant that the Harmony Town Court had been unable to receive electronically filed traffic tickets issued by police during that time, according to the commission.

Robert Tembeckjian, administrator of the commission, said in a statement that Colton's actions degraded the public confidence in his position.

“Public confidence in the courts requires town and village justices to account scrupulously for, and timely remit, all fines and other official funds in their care,” Tembeckjian said. “It also requires them to make prompt and accurate reports of dispositions, so that a judge in a later case, for example, may properly adjudicate and fine a repeat traffic offender.”

Colton, who represented himself before the commission, did not immediately return a call for comment Thursday. He practices real estate and business law at his firm. In a letter to the town supervisor in Harmony, he pegged his resignation on a “combination of personal matters and administrative issues.”

Colton first took office as a justice of the Harmony Town Court in 1990.