Nothing short of putting more judges onto the bench will reduce the ever-growing backlog of cases that now includes a 70% increase in pending domestic-violence matters, New Jersey’s courts administrator told lawmakers Tuesday.

Earlier this month, Judge Glenn Grant had told the Assembly Budget Committee that the Superior Court would have a record 75 vacancies as of May 1. Committee members were sympathetic but noted the Assembly has no power over judicial nominations. Tuesday, he delivered the same message to the budget committee in the Senate, which does vote on the governor’s judicial choices. There, some members blamed Gov. Phil Murphy.

“I don’t believe it’s through any fault of this branch of government. I think there are a lot of candidates, qualified candidates … awaiting the OK from the governor’s office,” said Sen. Michael Testa (R-Cumberland), adding that these are individuals who have already been vetted by the state bar association’s review committee. “Justice delayed is absolutely justice denied. So I don’t think that anybody’s going to object to filling those 75 vacancies. This is absolutely unacceptable.”

Grant noted that another 22 judges will be retiring by Dec. 31. So even if Murphy were to nominate and the Senate to confirm people for the 75 current openings, there will still be more slots to fill.

The COVID-19 pandemic temporarily closed the courts to in-person matters and led to the addition of more than 46,000 pending cases involving landlords and tenants. Without a nearly full complement of judges, it will be impossible to reduce the overall backlog of 87,000 cases, Grant said.

Among the most problematic areas for justice are those involving criminal and domestic-violence matters.

Grant said more than 7,000 individuals are being held without bail awaiting trial, with some 500 held more than two years despite the state’s speedy-trial law. And the number of pending domestic-violence cases, where a victim is living under the threat of potential further harm, has increased by about 72% from February 2020 — to 3,205, as of last month.

Plugging holes

The courts have made hearing these types of cases a priority, but there are still not enough judges to process them efficiently. And prioritizing them means other matters are taking even longer.

“We’ve had an uptick, for example, in domestic-violence filings and we still have the same number of civil filings coming in,” said Superior Court Assignment Judge Stuart Minkowitz, sitting in Morris County. “We have to basically take judges from their regular assignments to handle the assignments where people are in danger — for example, domestic violence docket — or to handle matters involving children.

Minkowitz also said increased numbers of people in domestic-violence cases are asking for full jury trials.

“Those cases are now taking days to get done, which means our family-court judges can’t get to divorces,” he said. “They can’t get to the things that are what we would term the bread and butter of the Family Division. People are waiting one, two, three years to get divorced because our judges are occupied in domestic-violence and children in court matters.”

Sen. Steve Oroho (R-Sussex) asked whether the courts can use retired judges to fill in and move cases along.

Grant said a number of judges have been recalled for this purpose, but they are only allowed to work roughly one quarter of a week because of a cap on the salary they can receive while collecting a pension.

Oroho suggested the Legislature might change those rules, but Grant said some former judges prefer to work in arbitration or take time off. It’s more important to permanently fill the vacancies so that there are judges well-versed in the law and their counties, Grant maintained.

“We recruit our judges who retire, we have a very aggressive recruitment campaign,” said Grant, a former judge who himself is working past the state’s mandatory retirement age of 70.

Who’s to blame?

Sen. Paul Sarlo (D-Bergen), who chairs the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee, praised the state’s process for fulfilling judgeships — through gubernatorial nomination and Senate confirmation, rather than by elections. But he said the Senate shouldn’t take all the blame and said the upper house was working with the governor’s office and “pushing them hard” to make nominations.

“I believe the process that we go about here in New Jersey, the political process of appointing judges, going through the whole nomination process and the appointment process, confirming them, and then seven years for reappointments, I think works better than any other state,” he said. “I’m not looking to lay blame. The Legislature is not the only part of the problem with vacancies. There is a third branch of government that has to appoint, as well.”

Senate Majority Leader Teresa Ruiz, whose home county of Essex has the most open seats — currently 12 with another three by the end of the year — agreed with Sarlo.

“If it were that easy, I’m sure all of us would have all the vacancies filled,” she said. “It is a more nuanced process that sometimes has hiccups in it and other times it’s just slowed up by appointments not being made as quickly as they should.”

View from governor’s camp

Murphy’s office repeated the comment it made when Grant testified two weeks ago before the Assembly. The governor “has vigorously worked to fill judicial vacancies, having made 73 judicial nominations, and having put 62 judges on the bench since he took office in 2018, with dozens more in the process of being vetted for nomination,” the office said.

Grant said the last time the judiciary had a workable number of vacancies of between 25 and 30 was during the first two years Murphy was in office.

In addition to the Superior Court vacancies, there are two openings on the Supreme Court. One is currently filled temporarily by an appellate judge, but the second seat is empty.

Chief Justice Stuart Rabner said earlier this year he would not fill the second vacancy temporarily with an appellate judge because the next judge in line would throw off the political balance of the state’s highest court. New Jersey’s Supreme Court traditionally has no more than four members of one political party and the appellate judge who is next in line for appointment is a Democrat.

After being sworn in to his second term in January, Murphy renominated Rachel Wainer Apter, director of the state Division on Civil Rights, to fill one of the openings. Apter’s nomination to fill a vacancy that arose last summer has been held up for more than a year by Sen. Holly Schepisi (R-Bergen) exercising the unwritten rule that allows senators to challenge the nomination of anyone from their county and stop the nominee from being considered.

Murphy has yet to nominate someone to fill the seat vacated by Faustino Fernandez-Vina, who retired two months ago upon reaching age 70.

The first opportunity Murphy will have to nominate any new judges will be May 9 during the next Senate quorum call.