Brooklyn Judge Resigning Amid Questions About Payments to Her Clerk

Yvonne Lewis

A Brooklyn judge with nearly 30 years on the bench resigned after being accused of improperly approving payments to her clerk for the clerk’s work as a court-appointed lawyer, officials announced on Thursday.

The judge, Yvonne Lewis of State Supreme Court, had also been charged with improperly presiding over guardianship cases in which her clerk, Kimberly L. Detherage, was also the court-appointed guardian.

“A judge shouldn’t play any role in any fiduciary case at the point that the person she hires is involved,” said Robert H. Tembeckjian, administrator of the State Commission on Judicial Conduct, which disciplines judges in New York.

Fiduciary cases in State Supreme Court, where judges have the power to assign private lawyers to lucrative posts as guardians for the young, elderly or infirm, have long been a magnet for patronage and the appearance of conflicts of interest — and the subject of periodic reform efforts.

Justice Lewis, 70, was elected to Civil Court in 1987 and has been an elected State Supreme Court justice since 1991. Her current term would have expired at the end of 2016.

She hired Ms. Detherage as her law clerk in 2009, the commission said. In 2013, after an article in The New York Post, the commission began investigating allegations that Justice Lewis had approved payments to Ms. Detherage for work she did as a guardian on cases being heard by other judges.

The commission said it opened a second investigation last year after the inspector general of the state courts alleged that Justice Lewis improperly presided over three cases where Ms. Detherage worked as a guardian and approved a guardianship payment to Ms. Detherage after hiring her as her full-time clerk.

“The moment she hires Detherage, she has to take herself off any matter involving Detherage,” Mr. Tembeckjian said.

The commission declined to reveal the amounts of the payments to Ms. Detherage that Justice Lewis was charged with improperly approving; figures for those payments could not be found on the state court system website.

From 2003 to 2008, before hiring Ms. Detherage, the website shows, Justice Lewis appointed her in at least 26 cases and approved at least $97,000 in fees.

Justice Lewis “denied certain aspects of the complaints and offered explanations as to certain aspects of the complaints,” according to a stipulation signed by her and the commission. The commission said it had not evaluated those denials and explanations because the judge’s resignation, which takes effect on Dec. 31, ended the case.

Justice Lewis’s lawyer, Deborah A. Scalise, said in a statement that if the commission had continued its investigation, “Justice Lewis is confident” that the charges “would be dismissed.”

Mr. Tembeckjian disagreed. “Had the matter proceeded, there would have been formal discipline,” he said.

Ms. Detherage left Justice Lewis’s employ in 2013 and is now in private practice, Mr. Tembeckjian said. She could not immediately be reached for comment.

Ms. Detherage has also been the pastor of St. Mark A.M.E. Church in Queens since 2010, a position that court officials said was full time and could have conflicted with her full-time job as a law clerk.

Correction: October 16, 2015
An earlier version of this article misidentified the job of Kimberly L. Detherage in one reference. As the article correctly notes elsewhere, Ms. Detherage was a law clerk, not a court clerk.

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Brooklyn Judge Resigning Amid Questions About Payments to Her Clerk