Inside the Chaos Brewing in the Manhattan Democratic Party

A Manhattan Democratic Party meeting descended into turmoil Tuesday night when the party’s second highest ranking official went all-in on an effort to scrap a process that had cut his wife from the party’s shortlist of judicial nominees.

It was two hours into an emergency video conference. The judicial nomination convention, at which the county Democrats would select judges to put on the ballot for state Supreme Court, was days away, and party judiciary committee members were expressing regret over a recent decision to overturn their process of narrowing their list of candidates. Observers, too — local Democratic officials, attorneys, party members — had also begun to chime in to voice alarm over the move, and the committee was gearing up to backtrack.

Then Domenico Minerva, the Manhattan Democrats’ county chair, spoke up. For 11 minutes, he rehashed allegations that those who came up with the shortlist had violated procedural rules — charges that, most who spoke in the meeting had decided, were either unfounded or trivial.

Minerva also addressed the elephant in the room: His wife, civil court judge Emily Morales-Minerva, was one of the candidates for nomination.

Morales-Minerva didn’t make the shortlist the committee was looking to reinstate. And she was at the center of allegations calling the shortlist’s credibility into question.

After Minerva broke his silence, the meeting — attended by two New York Focus journalists — went downhill: escalating alarm, legal confusion, hot mic comments, dueling accusations of conflicts of interest, and a dramatic vote with two surprise twists.

When it comes to state judges, the Manhattan Democratic Party is an outlier. In New York, general election nominations for lower court benches come directly from county parties rather than primary elections — and in most counties, the party leadership picks nominees directly. But Manhattan convenes panels of independent volunteers, who screen and interview applicants and create shortlists of the most qualified candidates. With limited exceptions, it’s from those lists that the party selects nominees — who are then all but guaranteed to breeze through their elections in the heavily blue borough.

The process has been relatively effective at preventing political forces from nominating bad judges, court watchers say. “It’s a successful system,” said Victor Kovner, a lawyer who helped create it more than 50 years ago. “It protects the public, protects the bar and judiciary, and protects the Democratic Party.”

This year’s general elections include three open slots for Manhattan’s Supreme Court, which hears civil and felony criminal trials. In late June, the Manhattan Democrats convened their screening panel, and over the next three weeks, the chosen volunteers — mostly representatives of local legal associations, plus a handful from advocacy groups — interviewed 19 applicants, checked their references, and dug into their records. They came up with a shortlist of nine, and the party announced them at a July 20 fundraiser. Emily Morales-Minerva didn’t make the cut.

But her husband heard complaints about the panel. In a meeting last week, he told the judiciary committee that two candidates had told him about sparsely attended panel interviews. He also said that party leadership had learned that the administrator of the panel hadn’t gathered written statements from panelists declaring that they had no conflicts of interest — a violation of party rules.

Outside the meeting, party leadership had also been discussing another concern — related to Minerva’s wife. A panelist had allegedly twice mentioned her candidacy to people outside the process, violating a confidentiality policy.

For the first half of Tuesday night’s video meeting, judiciary committee members peppered the panel’s volunteer administrator, Touro Law Center professor Meredith Miller, with questions about what came to be called alleged “procedural irregularities.”

When it came to panel members’ attendance, at least one candidate had complained that only half the panel was present during their interview, a judiciary committee member told Miller.

“That did not happen,” she responded. Miller, who was present at every interview and kept attendance records, said that, at worst, three panel members were absent at once, and that no candidate missed more than two meetings — in line with requirements set in the panel’s handbook.

The handbook also includes procedures for conflict disclosures — the subject of the second alleged issue — requiring that the panelists sign statements affirming that they meet panel criteria and don’t have vested interests in the outcome of the process. Miller asserted — and a judiciary committee co-chair confirmed to New York Focus — that, since the onset of Covid-19 and the transition to video panel meetings, signed forms had been replaced with verbal conflict disclosures.

After introducing himself, Minerva attempted to waive away rumors — which no one had yet explicitly mentioned — that rejecting the panel’s shortlist was part of a plan he orchestrated to get his wife a nomination. He claimed that his wife “is not running this year” — that is, she hadn’t been attending political fundraisers or courting delegates, and didn’t expect to win a nomination, even though she had applied for it. “So take that all out of your minds and remove that from the conversation.”

That’s “disingenuous,” Curtis Arluck, the judiciary committee co-chair, told New York Focus. Morales-Minerva “went into the panel seeking to be found to be most highly qualified, and did not come out of the panel,” he said. Arluck said it wasn’t announced that Morales-Minerva wasn’t seriously running until Tuesday’s meeting. Miller, the panel administrator, was also surprised. “I have not heard anything about that,” she told New York Focus.

Minerva then offered rebuttals to all of Miller’s explanations. He stressed the importance of written conflict disclosure forms, which he said was step one in the rulebook. He charged that there were “definitely” more than three people absent on the final day of interviews. And with respect to confidentiality: “It’s not like a subjective, ‘Oh, it wasn’t a big breach or a little breach,’” he said. “It’s a breach.”

“At the end of the day, the rules are the rules,” he said later in the meeting.