Mount Vernon Democrats

March 18th, 2010

Dear Mount Vernon Democrat,

Last night, March 17th, 2010 Mount Vernon Democratic City Committee Chairman, Devereaux Cannick
accompanied City of Mount Vernon Corporation Counsel Loretta Hottinger to the Westchester County
Democratic Committee Executive Committee held once a month.

Mr. Cannick shocked every local committee Chairman/woman that was in attendance when he announced
that Hottinger would be seeking their support for New York State Supreme Court this year. Hottinger
does not have any prior judicial experience. Her actions of wanting to be elected to Supreme Court
mirror that of an athlete wanting to go from elementary school straight to the Pros.

Hottinger has once again proved herself to be a political hack. The Mount Vernon Democratic City
Committee, under the leadership of Devereaux Cannick is viewed as the laughingstock of the entire State
of New York.

The integrity of the New York State judicial system is under attack. Devereux Cannick and Hottinger are
making a mockery of the judicial system. Cannick’s actions in Mount Vernon resemble that of Clarence
Norman’s in Brooklyn. Is Loretta Hottinger’s Supreme Court Judgeship for sale? Whatever the case may
be, Mr. Cannick has some explaining to do.

Hottinger is looking to pull a fast one on voters in the 9th Judicial District. The 9th Judicial district
consists of Westchester, Rockland, Putnam, Dutchess, and Orange Counties. Hopefully the party leaders
in the counties outside of Westchester have not taken a sip of the Kool-Aid that Cannick and Hottinger
are passing around.

Over the next few weeks, the public will be provided with details about Hottinger’s qualifications, current
work ethic, and corruption investigations. We will then forward our finding to every bar association in
the 5 counties previously mentioned. A website has been dedicated for this purpose. Please visit
www.hottingermustgo.blogspot.com .

mountvernondemocrats@gmail.com www.mountvernondemocrats.blogspot.com

“Democrats United For Progress”

Not Affiliated with the Mount Vernon Democratic City Committee
Picking Judges: Party Machines, Rubber Stamps

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
July 20, 2003 - NEW YORK TIMES

For decades in New York, the law has required that political parties nominate candidates to run for State
Supreme Court at judicial conventions, not in primaries. The conventions are attended by delegates who
are elected on the neighborhood level and who are supposed to evaluate candidates before offering the
best ones a spot on the November ballot.

In theory, the conventions are intended to help achieve the civic goal of allowing citizens, through their
votes, to decide the makeup of the state's highest trial court. But in practice, according to legal experts,
prosecutors and even the delegates themselves, the conventions have long been highly cynical exercises,
just another cog in the operations of political party machines.

There is, for instance, often no debate about candidates, and party leaders wind up dictating nominations,
frequently handing them to loyalists who have donated to the party or worked on campaigns.

In fact, the nominating conventions have received so little attention that the City Board of Elections says
it does not even keep an official record of those who serve as convention delegates -- the people legally
charged with helping determine who gets on the bench.

But The New York Times obtained lists of delegates from recent years in New York City, from an
election official who happened to still have them in his computer. An examination of the names of those
who served last year at the convention in Brooklyn, where the Democratic Party's role in the selection of
judges is now the subject of a criminal investigation, illustrates the party's naked hold over the process. It
is power that effectively allows party leaders to anoint judges because in an overwhelmingly Democratic
borough, the Democratic nomination is tantamount to election.

The Brooklyn convention last year was stocked with paid party workers, the relatives of Democratic
politicians and others who knew little if anything about the judicial candidates, according to the records.

Among the 150 or so delegates at the convention -- they gathered one September day, as is the custom, in
the unglamorous confines of the main jury room of the Downtown Brooklyn courthouse -- were
Assemblywoman Diane Gordon's mother and seven others who worked on her campaign;
Assemblywoman Rhoda S. Jacobs's husband and one of her legislative aides, and Assemblyman Felix W.
Ortiz's wife.

Assemblyman Clarence Norman Jr., the party leader, was himself a delegate, as were eight of his
campaign workers, according to records. Assemblyman Darryl C. Towns sent four campaign workers.

A dozen delegates, in recent interviews, said they could not even remember the handful of candidates they
had nominated for the State Supreme Court last year. They said the convention, as always, had been a
carefully scripted event lasting less than an hour.

Whether the candidates were potentially outstanding judges, the delegates said they never knew. Before
the convention, the party never makes an effort to inform them about which candidates are going to be
nominated. In fact, the names are often secret.
"Before it comes to us, it's already done," acknowledged Carolyn Faulkner, 64, a delegate last year who
said she had received the post because she worked on Assemblywoman Gordon's campaign and was
active in her political club. "Then we come in and just O.K. everything."

Another delegate, Rita Bryant, 78, referred to the convention as "in and out."

"You go in, it's 12 o'clock, and you are out at 12:30," she said. "It's really just a formality."

Ms. Faulkner and Ms. Bryant were among those who said they could not remember the candidates
nominated at the September 2002 convention and then elected in November.

Even some party leaders described the convention as all but farcical. Asked what his wife, Elba, knew
about the qualifications of the judicial candidates, Assemblyman Ortiz responded, "zero."

"These delegates really don't have any function," he said, adding that his wife was out of the country and
was not available to be interviewed.

Assemblywoman Jacobs said, "There is a fairly justified perception that things are sort of decided before
the delegates go in." She said her husband, Jerry, who died last fall, had not always supported the party's
candidates for judge when he was a delegate.

Party leaders, whether Republicans upstate or Democrats in the city, have long resisted calls to change the
convention system through legislation in Albany.

"Basically, what this is is a system of appointment by party officials," said Jerome A. Koenig, a former
chief of staff of the Assembly Election Committee. "While you can have a dispute over which is better,
election of judges or appointment of judges, I don't know that anybody could argue that appointment by
party officials is better than election by the public, or appointment by public officials."

Bob Liff, a spokesman for Assemblyman Norman and the Democratic leadership, defended the party and
said that Mr. Norman saw nothing wrong with the way that the judicial conventions were run. But Mr.
Liff added that in general, the party wanted to publicize more information on how it chose judicial
nominees. Last week, it released the names of 27 candidates whom a party screening committee had
deemed qualified for a State Supreme Court nomination. Eight seats are on the ballot in November.

"One of the things that this whole controversy has done is forced a revisiting of the process," Mr. Liff
said. "The idea is to make it more open."

The Brooklyn Democrats' judicial convention, which includes a small number of delegates representing
Staten Island Democrats, is by no means unusual. An examination of the delegate lists in other boroughs
shows similar party influence. In Queens, for example, Assemblywoman Vivian E. Cook was a delegate,
along with four of her campaign contributors. In the Bronx, Assemblyman Jeffrey Klein was one, as was
his mother, Marilyn.

Delegates for the judicial conventions are elected by State Assembly district, with the number set
according to the number of the party's votes in the district in the last election for governor. Usually, there
are 3 to 10 delegates per Assembly district.

The candidates for delegate run in the September primary, and the convention occurs soon after.
The positions are so obscure that local party officials typically handpick candidates and then help them
circulate petitions to get on the ballot. In most cases, they are unopposed. This year, there are expected to
be contested races for judicial delegate in only 2 of the more than 20 Assembly districts in Brooklyn,
officials said.

Indeed, because delegates are widely seen as little more than rubber stamps, party leaders say, they
sometimes have trouble finding candidates willing to go through the ritual. "Most people don't want to be
bothered," said Michael Geller, 60, a district leader in south Brooklyn who has been a delegate.

And those who do serve sometimes refuse to do so again.

"When they nominated me for that thing, I wasn't too familiar with it," said Carmine Melillo, 81, a
delegate last year. "I was really new at it. I didn't understand their procedures in doing it. That's why I'm
not doing it again this year."

Mr. Melillo was one of a handful of octogenarians at the convention in 2002, some of whom said they
were told by party lieutenants to show up and endorse whatever names were put forth by the leadership.
There were, too, a few lawyers with close party ties who have earned thousands of dollars in fees from
court appointments handed out by Brooklyn judges. In others words, they voted on candidates from
whom they might end up soliciting work.

The provision requiring that State Supreme Court justices be elected, rather than appointed, is in the State
Constitution, and thus would be hard to change. But the rule requiring that judicial conventions select
State Supreme Court candidates is in state law and could be changed by a single act of the governor and
Legislature.

Mr. Koenig, the state election expert, said that when Albany adopted primaries for most offices over the
last century, it exempted the State Supreme Court so that the parties could continue to dole out those jobs.

A small pocket of reformers at the Brooklyn convention has tried to block the party leadership but usually
fails. One of them, Assemblyman James F. Brennan, contended that judicial selection should be
overhauled. He has introduced a constitutional amendment in Albany that would make State Supreme
Court justices appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Senate. The governor would select the
judges from lists of candidates forwarded by blue-ribbon nominating commissions composed of members
appointed by elected officials and others.

Mr. Brennan said the stage-managed convention was symbolic of a process manipulated from the start by
party leaders behind closed doors. He pointed out that until recently, members of the party panel that put
forward the names for consideration at the conventions operated essentially in secret. "There's no question
that it's a meaningless process at the moment," he said.

But one Brooklyn delegate last year, Jacque Friedman, 75, ridiculed such complaints and said the
conventions worked well. He said it was up to the delegates to learn on their own whom party leaders
might be supporting and then to research the potential candidates' backgrounds. "It's not fair to criticize
this process from the standpoint that people don't have a chance," Mr. Friedman said. "If you are really
interested in this, you have to make an honest effort and try and find things out."

Still, if the case of Verdell Bivins is any indication, the party is not too eager to have an open and orderly
process.
Ms. Bivins, 64, the former chairwoman of her local community board, said she learned to her surprise
soon after the primary last year that someone had put her on the ballot as a judicial delegate and that she
had won. She was not especially interested in serving and, as it turned out, redistricting had put her home
outside the Assembly district where she had been elected, making her technically ineligible, she said.

She said she decided to go to the convention and tell the organizers her situation.

"I mentioned to them that I was no longer in the district, and you know what? They told me to vote
anyway," Ms. Bivins said. "I guess it didn't matter. It was during lunch hour, and the whole thing was so
short."
 Become A Judicial
Delegate For The 87th
Assembly District
Do not miss out on this exciting opportunity to become part of an
organization that has an intricate part in electing Judges to
New York State Supreme Court.
For More Information:
No Experience Necessary Will Train E-mail-mountvernondemocrats@gmail.com
Judicial Delegate positions are available www.mountvernondemocrats.blogspot.com
throughout many neighborhoods in Mount Vernon
and Yonkers. Hurry...Positions are going fast!! This Year (2010) The Mount
Vernon Democratic City Committee
and the Yonkers Democratic
Judicial Delegates will be fully trained. Committee must re-organize. As a
You will learn how to launch an effective result, there will be dozens of
campaign and the in’s and out’s of Judicial Delegate vacancies in
grassroots campaigning. election districts throughout the
City of Mount Vernon and Yonkers
Campaign classes start in April 2010 in a
neighborhood near you.

All interested candidates should e-mail a

resume and a photo of yourself . Please
also include the desired neighborhood
that you are interested in serving as a
Judicial delegate.

Not affiliated with the Mount Vernon Democratic City Committee or Yonkers Democratic Committee