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If you want to become a state court judge in New York it is simple. If you want to be a town or village judge, you need not attend or graduate from law school or pass the bar exam. You need not go through a character and fitness review. You can be a barber or a gas station attendant. Fifty-nine percent of the approximately 2,300 town and village justices in New York are not attorneys. While these facts involving these colonial courts are startling enough, a far more vexing concern is how one becomes a state court judge and what these judges do once they get there.

Supreme Court justices make $208,000 per year together with a pension, free medical and five weeks of paid vacation. In order to become a judge you must contribute to the political party of your choice and avoid controversy. Judgeships are essentially for sale, and all the lawyers know it, even though the public does not.

Political parties and their bosses can agree among themselves which candidates should be cross-endorsed even without any prior judicial experience. This means that they are virtually guaranteed of election and yet they assemble campaign committees, solicit contributions and kick back to the political parties endorsing them. Lawyers contribute to these campaigns because they know the judges, once elected, will remember their contributions and reward them with favorable rulings and assignments. Forensic experts such as accountants and psychologists also make their contributions expecting the same benefits.

When Mario Cuomo was governor he proposed the merit selection of judges. It was supported by the New York State Bar Association but not by the rank-and-file legal organizations, the Judiciary or the State Legislature. It was not approved.

If we are going to elect judges, lawyers should be banned from contributing to judicial campaigns. If anyone also was involved in helping the judge to secure his or her nomination, or contributed to the judicial campaign, judges should be required to reveal that on the record and recuse themselves.

The practice ordered by the court of the so-called married spouse (usually a man) paying directly the fees of attorney for the children and fees for experts should also be discontinued. This practice creates proprietary interests in which these attorneys and experts favor their benefactors. The AFC's and experts should not know who is paying them. These funds should be paid to an administrator who can then disburse them.

There are a great many cases within our judicial system in which unknowing parties or litigants are victims of the endemic corruption that abides there. In some cases these victims are women and children who have experienced violence and/or death. In these cases, Band-Aid solutions are proposed rather than recognized as a coverup of the corruption that exists from top to bottom.

Thomas F. Liotti is an attorney and village justice on Long Island.