In the fall of 2023, Richard Snyder was summoned for jury duty at the Rensselaer County Supreme Court in Troy, New York. Not everyone who is summoned for jury duty makes it on a jury, though; instead, the larger pool of prospective jurors goes through a process that requires them to answer screening questions to determine who actually gets seated. And on October 18, 2023, the judge dismissed Snyder from a special grand jury empanelment after he said he believed people “would not be in front of” the court unless they were “guilty.” Snyder further explained that “it would not be fair” for him to serve on a jury because he didn’t think he could be impartial.
One small problem: Snyder told the court that he is a judge, too—the elected Justice of the Petersburgh Town Court in Rensselaer County, a position he won in 2013 after running unopposed as a Republican and receiving 329 votes.
The presiding judge quite sensibly determined that if it’s not fair to have Snyder on a jury, it’s not fair to have him on the bench. So after dismissing Snyder from the jury pool, the judge notified the New York State Commission on Judicial Misconduct, which announced in a press release last week that Snyder has resigned from office and had “agreed to never return.”
Snyder’s admission would be laughable if it were not so worrisome. Judges have a responsibility to treat the people in their courtrooms fairly. That obligation is arguably even more important for criminal defendants who face the possible loss of their liberty. Yet for years, Snyder was judging the cases of people that, by his own admission, he had already pre-judged. And he would still be doing so today if he had only remembered not to say the quiet part out loud.
New York has nearly 1200 Town & Village Courts like the one over which Snyder presided, which collectively handle nearly 1 million cases each year. Most of the cases are lower-stakes—civil claims of up to $3,000, and criminal misdemeanors and traffic violations—but can include arraignments and preliminary hearings in felony matters. Justices in these courts are not required to be lawyers, and over half of them are not. Snyder did not attend college or law school, and told local newspaper The Eastwick Press during the 2013 election that he was “looking forward to learning about the law.”
Apparently, Snyder still had a lot to learn. When testifying at his misconduct hearing, one of the commission’s lawyers, Kathleen Klein, asked Snyder if, in his mind, a ticket means “that the defendant before you did something wrong.” Snyder said yes. When asked whether he sees “any issue with that thinking in sitting as Town Justice,” he said no.
Klein asked Snyder to explain what he meant during the grand jury screening when he said he “knows” that those who come before him are guilty, because otherwise, they “would not be in front of me.” Snyder replied, “I meant that they were ‘guilty’ because they did something wrong. But they’re not guilty till they come to court.” It seems that for Snyder, defendants are innocent until proven guilty, but also, appearing in court to face charges is some sort of proof of guilt.
“It is bad enough that a judge would seek to avoid such a fundamental civic responsibility as jury service,” said Commission Administrator Robert Tembeckjian in last week’s press release. “It is astounding that the judge would claim an inability to be impartial, and to declare under oath that the accused must be guilty or they would not be in court.”
Snyder explained during his hearing that he was really just trying to get out of jury duty because he is the primary caregiver for his grandchildren. “I wanted to say that I got my grandkids that I watch every day,” he said. “I thought maybe, you know, being the Judge, they wouldn’t pick me.” If Snyder was honest about the real reason he was trying to get out of jury duty, he may not have wound up revealing his biases against defendants, and might still be a judge. The public only knows about Snyder’s partiality because he made the mistake of mentioning it out loud. It has to wonder about how many other sitting judges may quietly feel the same way.
