I've lived pretty much all of my life in NYS and thankfully (knock on wood) have not run across this personally although I do know a few people that have experienced similar injustices all over NY. It never occured to me however that these BS judges are not trained in ANY law at all however it explains so much.

It's not only in NY state that this is going on either. According to the article NY is one of 30 states that still work the same antiquated (and unconstitutional/unAmerican) way. Is your state one of them? We must fix these "broken benchs".

The article is long and has many more outragious examples... here are just a few:

In Tiny Courts of New York, Abuses of Law and Power

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Nearly three-quarters of the judges are not lawyers, and many — truck drivers, sewer workers or laborers — have scant grasp of the most basic legal principles. Some never got through high school, and at least one went no further than grade school.

But serious things happen in these little rooms all over New York State. People have been sent to jail without a guilty plea or a trial, or tossed from their homes without a proper proceeding. In violation of the law, defendants have been refused lawyers, or sentenced to weeks in jail because they cannot pay a fine. Frightened women have been denied protection from abuse.

<snip>

A woman in Malone, N.Y., was not amused. A mother of four, she went to court in that North Country village seeking an order of protection against her husband, who the police said had choked her, kicked her in the stomach and threatened to kill her. The justice, Donald R. Roberts, a former state trooper with a high school diploma, not only refused, according to state officials, but later told the court clerk, “Every woman needs a good pounding every now and then.” ( Until recently we lived in the town of Malone. )

<snip>

And several people in the small town of Dannemora were intimidated by their longtime justice, Thomas R. Buckley, a phone-company repairman who cursed at defendants and jailed them without bail or a trial, state disciplinary officials found. Feuding with a neighbor over her dog’s running loose, he threatened to jail her and ordered the dog killed.

“I just follow my own common sense,” Mr. Buckley, in an interview, said of his 13 years on the bench. “And the hell with the law.”