NYP Reports: Judge Noach Dear has been booted from Brooklyn Criminal Court a month after his bizarre ruling barred police from ticketing public drinkers unless cops lab-tested their booze. The ouster comes amid outrage over his June 14 decision, which dismissed a case against a Brooklyn man, Julio Figueroa, who admitted he was sipping a beer on the street. The judge concluded that enforcement of laws on drinking in public is racially biased.
Dear, 59, a scandal-scarred ex-city councilman elected to the bench in 2007 and relegated to hearing low-level debt disputes in recent years, had volunteered to take criminal cases on the weekends in a bid to get promoted, courthouse insiders said.
Dear’s ruling nullified a long-accepted police practice — sniffing a suspect’s beverage — and meant police would be required to conduct a chemical analysis to make their cases stick.
Open-container summonses are a widely used policing tool, resulting in more than 12,000 arrests for other crimes in 2011, by one police supervisor’s estimate. Cops wrote 124,498 drinking tickets during the year.
Read More at the Post
Read more:
