CHIEF JUDGE URGES AMENDING CONSTITUTION TO REALIGN COURTS

ALBANY --- The state's chief judge, Judith S. Kaye, called today for a
constitutional amendment to streamline the state's tangled court system, a
plea she has made in the past without success.

"I think we continue to fail the public," Judge Kaye said during her annual
address on the state of the judiciary. She said the existence of nine kinds
of trial courts is inefficient and an obstacle to people seeking to use the
courts. "We can no longer cling to this cumbersome court structure."

Judge Kaye, who is also the head of the Court of Appeals, the state's
highest court, also urged the Legislature to revamp the state's
Rockefeller-era drug laws and to raise the pay of court-appointed lawyers.

The chief judge spoke just before a ceremony honoring 23 court officers who
helped rescue people during the attack on the World Trade Center, including
three who died.

Judge Kaye said she would soon send the Legislature a proposed amendment to
the State Constitution that would expand a pilot program she introduced
last year. Under the program, a single Supreme Court justice has been
handling all the myriad cases involving each troubled family, from assaults
to divorce proceedings to child custody disputes. The idea is to have one
judge handle the problems of a single family.

The chief judge said she would like to do the same kind of case
consolidation in all courts across the state, a move she said would save
about $130 million over five years. She described the proposal as a way to
expedite handling of spouse-beating cases, but her aides said it would have
the effect of consolidating seven of the nine courts into two tiers.

The upper tier would absorb the courts with overlapping jurisdiction on
domestic violence cases -- the Supreme Court, Family Court and County
Court. The lower tier would take in city, town and village courts, which
primarily handle misdemeanors and small-scale civil cases.

What would happen to the Surrogate's Court, which administers estates, and
the Court of Claims, which handles suits against the state, was not clear.

Judge Kaye, a Democrat who was appointed by Gov. Mario M. Cuomo in 1983,
said the success of special courts set up to handle drug cases had been
jeopardized by the Legislature's failure to overhaul what she called
"draconian Rockefeller drug laws.

"The unreasonably strict limitations on judicial sentencing discretion mean
that many nonviolent offenders who are otherwise good candidates are not
eligible for court-supervised drug treatment," she said.

The chief judge also lamented the Legislature's failure last year to raise
the pay scale for court-appointed lawyers for indigent defendants in
criminal cases. Those lawyers now earn $25 an hour for work outside court
and $40 an hour during a trial. Those fees are among the lowest in the
nation, she said.

Fewer and fewer lawyers each year agree to accept the assignments, she
said, causing overwhelming caseloads for those who are left.