11/02/2025
Three New York judges resign after misconduct investigations
by Gary Craig
A judge in Rensselaer County tried to skirt jury duty with an acknowledgment that he thinks the defendants who appear before him are all guilty. He's no longer on the bench.
Nor is the judge in Erie County who has left the bench for a second time. He was at the center of a strange ticket-fixing scandal over a decade ago involving an individual posing as a defendant.
And there is the judge in Steuben County also now exiting the bench after driving drunk.
In all, it's been a bad week for judges in New York. The Commission on Judicial Conduct, the state's judicial investigative watchdog, this week announced the results of the three separate investigations, all ending with the judges giving up their black robes and gavels.
'I know they're guilty'
In late 2023, Richard Snyder, the judge in the Rensselaer town of Petersburgh, was among a group of prospective grand jurors. In a private recorded conversation with the presiding judge, Snyder, who is not a lawyer, tried to get himself exempted from the grand jury proceedings.
He was advised that judges aren't exempt from jury service. That's when, the transcript shows, Snyder went on to explain that he thinks the defendants who come before him are surely guilty of something.
“I know everybody come in front of me, I know they are guilty," he said. "They would not be in front of me."
He continued on, commenting that those with speeding tickets before him surely did something wrong. He said he acknowledged that defendants were expected to be innocent until prove guilty.
“It is bad enough that a judge would seek to avoid such a fundamental civic responsibility as jury service," Commission on Judicial Conduct Administrator Robert Tembeckjian said. "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 has agreed to give up his judgeship and never seek another one.
A judge returns, unexpectedly
A headline a year ago in the Buffalo-based Investigative Post stated, "Disgraced former judge returns to the bench."
This was a bit of a surprise to those who thought that the Lackawanna judge, Louis Violanti, had lost the job a decade ago after a bizarre incident in his courtroom.
As the Post reported last year, "In December 2012, Violanti promised a friend he’d 'take care of' a citation the friend had been given for an expired registration, according to an investigation into the incident by the Erie County District Attorney."
"The judge took the ticket from the friend. The following month, when the friend was due in court, Violanti gave the ticket to a Lackawanna police officer assigned to his courtroom. The judge instructed the officer to impersonate the friend, who was not present, then dismissed the ticket 'in the interest of justice.'"
Violanti resigned from office in 2013, and the commission then could not legally secure a pledge from him that he wouldn't again seek a judgeship. Violanti also lost his law license. It was reinstated in 2016, and last year the Lackawanna mayor reappointed him to the city court bench.
His return to the bench prompted the judicial conduct commission to revisit the decade-old allegations because of their egregiousness. This time, Violanti agreed to step away from the bench permanently.
"Had the Commission not been constrained by time limits in the law, the judge would have been removed in 2013 and constitutionally ineligible to return," Tembeckjian said. "Instead, a decade later he came back, only to face discipline and agree to the inevitable: permanent departure from the bench."
Drunken driving judge
In June, Julie Kuck, a town justice in the Steuben town of Linden, was criminally charged with drunken driving after a traffic stop by state police in Erwin, New York.
"Troopers charged Kuck with driving while intoxicated and operating a motor vehicle with a blood alcohol level of .08 percent or higher, both misdemeanors, and aggravated driving while intoxicated via Leandra’s Law for allegedly driving intoxicated with a child under the age of 15 in the vehicle, a felony," The Leader in Corning reported.
In November, Kuck satisfied the criminal charges with a plea to the misdemeanor crime of driving while intoxicated.
That same month, the commission opened an investigation into the drunken driving incident. In January Kuck, who is not a lawyer, agreed to step down from the bench permanently.
— Gary Craig is a veteran courts reporter who has written extensively over the past 30 years of misconduct allegations against New York judges.
