Prejudging Hector LaSalle: Hochul’s nominee to lead New York’s highest court is well-suited, despite the left wing’s complaints

Progressives in New York, including some members of the state Senate Democratic conference, seem to think that Gov. Hochul has nominated a right wing nutjob to be chief judge of the Court of Appeals, the highest judicial body in the state.

They must be looking at a different Hector LaSalle. The real LaSalle is the presiding justice of the gigantic Brooklyn Appellate Division, which covers all of downstate except the Bronx and Manhattan, a very busy bench that he’s sat on for eight years. Earlier, he was a state Supreme Court trial judge on Long Island and before donning the robes he served as an assistant state attorney general and assistant Suffolk County district attorney.

He’s an experienced, tempered appeals judge who also managed a court system. Sounds like the right kind of person to be the next chief judge. Which is why the dozen members of the state Commission on Judicial Nomination selected LaSalle and six other highly qualified judges and lawyers for Hochul to choose from.

Actually, Hochul kind of picked two, announcing that should the Senate confirm LaSalle, he will make Judge Edwina Richardson-Mendelson (who was also on the list of seven) the chief administrative judge, the day-to-day manager running the largest — and by far most complex and convoluted — judiciary in the country. Richardson-Mendelson is currently a top court system official.

Thus Hochul has now fulfilled her duty, in fact she did it a day before the legal deadline. But the lefties are angry. They attacked the commission when it deliberated and they whacked several of the seven picks. Now they are slamming LaSalle. Any senator is free to vote no. But that vote must be within 30 days.

If Hochul wants to help LaSalle and Richardson-Mendelson manage, she should veto a terrible bill that handcuffs court leaders from deciding which state Supreme Court justices should get extensions from the mandatory retirement age of 70. Most are extended, but occasionally a lousy judge is properly denied. The bill would abolish any discretion. Veto it, gov.