If junk-justice had a personification, it would be Brooklyn Criminal Court Judge Evelyn LaPorte.
The jurist who once said, “There is no better job in the world than that of being a judge,” and I have to interpret and evaluate what is in front of me, be just and at the same time make sure that I keep my community safe,” emerged as a key player in the Dec. 5 fatal shooting of East New York Patrolman Peter Figoski. She released his alleged killer — gun-wielding, drug-dealing career-con Lamont Pride — without bail last month after a drug bust in Coney Island, ignoring Pride’s outstanding arrest warrant in another state for aggravated assault. She even announced defiantly, “I am not going to set bail even though the drugs were [found] pursuant to a search warrant.”
LaPorte’s jurisnonsense is nothing new. She released accused pedophile Rabbi Yehuda Kolko of Midwood on his own recognizance in 2010. The yeshiva teacher copped a plea to avoid jail time, and later violated an order of protection against one of his victims, earning a wrist slap from LaPorte who told him, “Don’t look at them!”
Two years earlier, LaPorte dismissed charges against two men accused of wheeling their dead friend’s corpse down a busy street and trying to cash his Social Security check because prosecutors didn’t know when the man died. She was also the presiding judge when former Bay Ridge democratic district leader and private investigator Ralph Perfetto represented his relative during a preliminary court hearing in 2008, and a nonchalant witness when she testified at Perfetto’s own trial in May for posing unlawfully as an attorney, according to the P.I.
“When questioned about her 17 years in the Brooklyn district attorney’s office and her experience with detective investigators signing in as ‘D.I.’, she answered in a cavalier manner, ‘It could mean personal injury’,” Perfetto says.
LaPorte’s ascension to the bench in Brooklyn also raises eyebrows. She was elected in 2004 courtesy of corrupt ex-Assemblyman Clarence Norman, the disgraced chairman of the Kings County Democratic Party now in jail for accepting illegal campaign contributions.
Her delinquency on the job proves why LaPorte should have stuck to her first choice of profession — flying in the sky.
www.brooklyneagle.com/categories/category.php?category_id=4&id=35775“>“I didn’t come here to be a lawyer, I came here to be an airline stewardess!” the judge, who moved here from Puerto Rico, informed students visiting her courtroom last year.
An effective judicial system is the cornerstone of America, and a critical barometer for fledgling democracies around the world. It should be upheld by individuals capable of balancing their unmitigated power with the appreciation that comes with being called “Your Honor.”
LaPorte’s noxious power trip has cost four daughters their beloved dad — one of the finest among the Finest who was the antithesis of Lamont Pride, making 200 arrests in his 22-year career and receiving 12 medals, including one for helping to nab the Zodiac killer in the 1990s.
She needs to be disrobed when her term expires in 2014 or impeached by the New York Supreme Court for gross misconduct because law-abiding New Yorkers need her like they need a hole in the head.
Sabruzzo@CNGLocal.com
Shavana Abruzzo's column appears every Friday on BrooklynDaily.com. She can be reached at sabruzzo@cnglocal.com.
