New website tracks performance of NY judges

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Voters in New York state now have a new tool for learning about judicial candidates who are seeking re-election or running for a new judicial seat.

The website Scrutinize provides extensive information about judicial decisions, appellate review, the publication rate of rulings, sentencing, bail, and disciplinary actions.

“What we tried to do is take public data and make that data accessible and usable to the public and to decision makers so that they know what is happening in their courts and can make better decisions about whether they want to change the courts or not,” said Oded Oren, founder and executive director of Scrutinize.

The website provides free data on more than 1,200 judges at city, county, and state court levels. The website currently does not include town or village judges or appellate judges.

“New Yorkers appear before state judges every day in cases involving criminal justice, housing, child custody, and more. In each of these cases, judges wield enormous power over the outcome,” Oded said.

“Despite the power of the judges and their impact on people’s lives, there has never been a centralized, accessible way for voters, judicial selection committees, bar associations, and others, to assess judges’ decision-making,” he said.

Oren, a former Bronx public defender, who also writes computer code used to gather and analyze the data, says Scrutinize “is designed to support fair and informed evaluations of judges seeking a new term.”

The data is analyzed by a combination of computer algorithms and AI, along with some manual review.

“I think what we’re going to see is a shift toward more and more artificial intelligence,” he said.

Oren said some of the data needed for the judge profiles, such as sentencing information, is not readily available. State officials recently provided two decades of sentencing records provided in response to a Freedom of Information Law request. That data now must be analyzed before being added to the judicial profiles.

Some information used by Scrutinize is gathered from decisions posted on the New York State Law Reporting Bureau website, but many judges do not submit their decisions to the Bureau.

“The publication rate is a measure of how often they choose to do this,” Oren said.

“For some of the judges in criminal court, where publication is much lower than in civil court, you’ll see that you have judges who have been on the bench for 10 years and have published one or two decisions. And we know for a fact that judges author a lot more decisions than that. They just choose not to make it public,” he said.

“Right now, with the system we have here, they are allowed to do that. They have no discipline or anything for doing that, but our argument on why this metric is important is that this is how the public can learn what judges are deciding, how they’re interpreting the law, whether they are making mistakes, whether they are being biased, whether they’re thinking very smartly about the law,” he said.

“When you, as a voter, or when a decision maker in the selection committee has to decide whether to re-elect a judge or reappoint a judge, you don’t have a lot of information to go on when judges are not publishing their decisions,” he said.

“We think it’s necessary both to change the way the system operates, but also to call out judges who are doing well or not doing well on this because it’s such a vital data point for the public,” he said.

“You should be able to look up a judge and see what impacts they’re having and to be able to decide whether you want to re-elect them or not and right now as a voter you have just very little information,” he said.

Oren started out about two years ago by writing reports that were released to the public based on the sort of data now available on the website, but he discovered the reports were not widely read.

“Nobody really wants to read 40 pages of legal jargon and a description of why an excessive sentence is an excessive sentence,” he said.

Last year, during primary season, he decided to put profiles of New York City judges online to see what traffic and interest they got, and they received lots of attention. That led to making all the data available, which now covers activity through 2024.

The plan is to add even more data to Scrutinize, such as information about appellate judges.

“I don’t know exactly when those are going to see the light of day, but I think there is a lot of room there for public discourse,” he said.

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