WHAT MAKES A GOOD JUDGE? A FELON-TURNED-JOURNALIST EXPLAINS
"I WAS 3 YEARS INTO A 13 YEAR PRISON SENTENCE OF MANSLAUGHTER IN 1993 WHEN JUSTICE ANTHONY V. CARDONA SENT ME A ‘LETTER.’"
Prisoner art recovered from New York City’s notorious Spofford Juvenille Detention Center in the Bronx before its demolition. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
MALONE, NEW YORK OPINION
Nov. 16, 2025
I was about to enter an appellate courtroom in Albany to argue one of the most important free press cases New York's courts have faced in the 21st Century when words engraved on a plaque attached to the door stopped me dead in my tracks.
"Dedicated To The Memory of PRESIDING JUSTICE ANTHONY V. CARDONA," the plaque read.
Those words hit me like a bullet fired from the past.
A lot of circles have been clicking closed in my life lately—the one Justice Cardona opened 32 years ago is only the latest.
I was 3 years into a 13 year state prison sentence for manslaughter in 1993 when Justice Cardona sent me a “letter” encouraging me to continue the work I started as a jailhouse lawyer.
Cardona had just been appointed to a coveted seat on the Appellate Division, Third Department across the street from the State Capital in Albany. Having risen from an Italian slum just down the street in the South End, Cardona's accomplishment was real.
Appellate Division judges have a formal title: "Justice." Many hold the title. Few meet its high-standard. Cardona was one of the few. Justice Cardona's "letter" wasn't actually a letter. It was better. It was a favorable decision in a lawsuit I'd filed against state prison officials challenging their decision to send me to solitary confinement for bogus misconduct charges.
"Although petitioner raises several contentions, we need only address one as it is determinative," the opinion Justice Cardona wrote said. "The record supports petitioner’s argument that he was denied a fair and impartial hearing by the Hearing Officer in that his guilt was predetermined."
Cardona even ordered prison officials to pay back what it cost me to file that lawsuit.
"Adjudged that the determination is annulled, with costs, and petition granted," he wrote.
Not just winning but winning costs too was amazing in its own right. But the thing that really amazed me and my colleagues in the prison law library was that Cardona got the rest of the court's judges to go along with him. The Third Department was notoriously Conservative at that time. We read all of their decisions and they seemed to always rule against prisoners.
I'd pulled off a stunning wild card upset.
I reduced that early victory in my career as a jailhouse lawyer to almost a footnote by the many greater and more glorious victories I later won in court and life. But I never forgot Cardona's name, or the respect for courts and judges he gifted me with.
"The System" could work for us too—if we learned the law and used it against them.
Paroled in 2003, I went to New York City, worked for civil rights lawyer Ron Kuby, graduated from NYU with a creative writing degree and started working as a journalist for the New York Post in 2006. 19 years after that, I'm living 400 miles north in the Adirondack mountains along the Canadian frontier publishing this news blog.
I planned to be wilderness and fly-fishing guide in my new life outside of New York City, even successfully suing for and winning a New York State guiding license. But the murder of Robert Brooks by a beat-up squad of all-white guards while nurses watched at the Marcy Correctional Facility outside Utica on Dec. 9, 2025 made it impossible for me to walk away from journalism.
Now-retired Justice Carl J. Mugglin was another Appellate Division, Third Department judge I liked. I interviewed him at his Catskill home in 2021 about sentencing the “Catskill Bonnie & Clyde” to life in prison in 1989. When Bonnie was paroled she become a licensed hair dresser. When I interview Mugglin, she was regularly cutting the retired judge’s hair. A former colleage said Mugglin was a great judge. "Some judges could be kind of bastardly. For no real reason," he said. "Mugglin was never like that. He was an excellent judge. He didn’t get excited. He didn’t get mad. He was a very bright guy. Good sense of humor."
I covered Brooks’ killing, the mid-winter strike by guards that followed and the criminal prosecution of the killer guards. One thing I wasn't able to cover was the administrative disciplinary hearings the state prison system says its holding for guards alleged to have committed crimes and employee rule violations in relation to Brooks' killing.
That system is notoriously toothless and ineffective. It allowed a culture of impunity to flourish in the shadows, and ultimately it allowed beat-up squads of guards at two prisons to devolve into Death Squads that murdered Brooks at Marcy and Messiah Nantwi across the road from Marcy at Mid-State—less than three months later.
The state agency that runs the state prison system is called the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision. DOCCS for short. I demanded DOCCS' Commissioner Daniel Martuscello allow me to witness the hearings for Brooks and Nantwi's killers in person but Martuscello ignored my demands.
Which is how, in 2025, I ended up suing Martuscello in state supreme court for press access to all prison guard disciplinary hearings going forward. A judge who was a state prison guard's son and couldn't outrun his father's long shadow dismissed my lawsuit.
I appealed—to Justice Cardona's court, the Appellate Division, Third Department.
The court granted my request for oral argument and there I was, standing at the door to the courtroom last Thursday frozen still at seeing Justice Cardona's name rise up out of the past. Time and space swirled around me. Then it was over. Still again, I strode into Justice Cardona's courtroom, stood at the lectern and delivered perfection—what fighting for civil rights for 35 years taught me.
"May it please the Court," I began, "Democracies die behind closed doors."
Back at home in my mountain hideout later that night I Googled Justice Cardona to see why they named a courtroom after him. But I already knew.
Cardona was a judge for a total of 27 years. He was named presiding judge of the Third Department in 1994. He served as chief until his death from cancer on Dec. 4, 2011.
More than 100 judges from around the state and scores of court officers attended Cardona's funeral. They all wore white gloves and white carnations pinned to their lapels. They marched New Orleans-style through downtown Albany streets to St. Mary's Church. During the service, mourners sang "12 Days of Christmas," the Albany Times Union reported.
Judith Kaye, former chief judge of New York's highest court, the Court of Appeals, was one of them.
"His overwhelming quality was his personal goodness, kindness and caring," she said. "He was a marvelously learned and astute judge and a warm human being at his core. That's the perfect combination that yields justice."
"One of his great lines was, 'We're going to sit down and make sauce,'" Justice Joseph Teresi, a fellow State Supreme Court judge, said. "It meant 'sit down and work this out, not be adversarial.'"
Fellow Appellate Division justice Thomas Mercure thought Cardona's tenure as the Third Department's Presiding Judge set such a high example he produced a law review article memorializing it in 2010: "A TRIBUTE TO PRESIDING JUSTICE ANTHONY V. CARDONA: THE CORE VALUES OF COURTESY AND RESPECT DISPLAYED IN JURISPRUDENCE AND COURT ADMINISTRATION."
A year before Cardona's death, Mercure wrote Cardona "has not forgotten where he came from and firmly acts to protect the 'little guy' who finds him- or herself navigating the turbulent waters of the court system."
Rob Cardona Jr., a cousin of the judge, called him "the most down-to-earth person I ever met."
"I got into my fair share of trouble growing up," Cardona Jr. added, "and he always pointed me in the right direction."
I could say the same thing about Justice Cardona and the 1993 decision he authored in my favor.
New Yorkers interested in making sure the state prison system treats people in its custody humanely can only hope the judges who took Cardona's place remember the lessons of the man the courtroom they sit in is named after.
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