New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. Photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office

The new year begins with nine vacant judicial seats in New York City Civil Court waiting to be filled by Mayor Bill de Blasio, a shortage that court officials and a Queens lawmaker said will  frustrate efforts to reduce case backlogs.

In a letter sent last month to de Blasio's office, Chief Judge Janet DiFiore said it's a priority for the court system to reduce the number of cases involving inmates at the jail facility on Rikers Island, a goal de Blasio supports. Delays in filling the vacancies “frustrate our efforts and make our mutually shared goals much more difficult to achieve,” DiFiore said.

“If the vacancies are not filled on time, courtrooms throughout the city will be closed, and litigants cases will not be heard,” DiFiore said.

The mayor's office is responsible for making interim appointments to the Civil Court. The interim appointees serve terms of up to one year and can be assigned to the city's criminal and family courts.

The vacancies are also a matter of concern for City Councilman Rory Lancman of Queens, who chairs the Committee on the Justice System and who has taken de Blasio to task in the past for delays in getting judges appointed in the city's courts.

“It's deja vu all over again,” Lancman said. “Every year, like clockwork, there are judicial vacancies that need to be filled.”

In a Dec. 31 letter to Lancman, Alexis Blane, first deputy counsel to the mayor, said de Blasio picked six attorneys for interim appointments to the Civil Court and that his picks are being vetted by the New York City Bar Association. The remaining vacancies will be addressed in the coming weeks, Blane wrote.

Jane Meyer, a spokeswoman for de Blasio's office, said that the vacancies will be filled “well within the permitted timeframe.”

“Every New Yorker deserves access to a fair and equitable justice system and the choice of qualified judges is essential to maintaining its integrity,” Meyer said.

In 2017, when Lancman also took the mayor's office to task for vacancies in the Civil Court, counsel for de Blasio's office argued that it is difficult to find qualified attorneys in the city who are willing to take a year out of their professional lives to serve on the bench.

Lancman said that in his contacts with the mayor's office over the current raft of vacancies, representatives for the office have not reprised the argument that good interim appointees are hard to find. But Lancman said he chalks up the delays by de Blasio's office as “bureaucratic indifference.”

Lawrence Marks, chief administrative judge of the Office of Court Administration, said the process is further complicated by the fact that the appointees for the remaining nine vacancies—which he called a “big number”—would also need to be vetted by the City Bar.

“We've been making great progress in eliminating case backlogs in all of our courts, but in particular the New York City Criminal Court,” Marks said. “We're very concerned that the delay in making these appointments will set us back.”

Indeed, recent data shows that, as police and prosecutors in New York City have begun to take less heavy-handed approaches to low-level crime, the number of new cases taken to the city's Criminal Court has plunged from 808,868 in 2013 to 434,045 in 2017.

But Marks said the decline does not negate the need for more judges in the city.

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