‘Plodding’ Federal Judge Still Pondering 1990 Civil Rights Case
A “famously plodding judge” has spent a decade pondering his options after a magistrate recommended a $5.4 million judgment against a New York town for civil rights violations, the New York Times reports.
The case against Island Park, filed in 1990, alleged that village officials gave federally subsidized home loans to politically connected residents rather than low-income people who were supposed to get the money.
U.S. District Judge I. Leo Glasser of Brooklyn ruled five years later that the government had proved much of its case and ordered a magistrate to decide damages. But Glasser still has not acted on the magistrate’s 1997 recommendation, the Times says.
“Letters, motions, conferences, adjournments, requests for extensions, motions for reconsideration of earlier motions, and other delays—all have consumed months and years at a time, for going on two decades now,” the newspaper says.
Glasser has an impeccable reputation, the newspaper says, but he is among the judges with a long docket of pending cases in the notoriously slow eastern district of New York.
Glasser is now considering a motion that asks him to renounce his initial liability decision in the case.
