Combative Bronx Judge Faces Calls for Removal

A notoriously combative Bronx judge is facing new calls to be reassigned after his latest confrontation with an attorney.

Acting Supreme Court Justice Ralph Fabrizio, whose reported outbursts have led to complaints from prosecutors and public defenders alike, told the attorney he was yanking her off a murder case because of her refusal to move forward with proceedings.

The attorney, Stacey Richman, said she could not take part in a scheduled pretrial hearing, claiming prosecutors had not gotten her the evidence they had against her client. Fabrizio responded, “Okay,” and initially seemed amenable to a delay.

But after officers escorted Richman’s client, an alleged Hells Angels member facing charges stemming from a 2020 shooting, into the courtroom, the judge’s tone shifted dramatically.

Citing his frustrations with the proposed delay, Fabrizio threatened to outright reject a defense motion ahead of a hearing challenging evidence in the case, and declared he was going to appoint a new attorney for the defendant, a man named Frank Tatulli.

The judge promptly failed to follow through on his threat, scheduling the hearing, which Richman served as counsel on two months later.

Fabrizio and Richman declined to comment for this story. But another attorney, representing another client in front of Fabrizio that day, said the judge acted as if Richman’s refusal was a “personal insult.”

“He started screaming at some point, and then he goes back to normal,” said the attorney, who requested anonymity to avoid retaliation. “It’s kind of creepy to watch.”

The judge’s initial order and subsequent about-face came little more than a month after he received criticism for another instance of flip-flopping. In that case, Fabrizio vacated the wrongful conviction of a man named Norberto Peets, and then suddenly reinstated it, only to vacate it again shortly after receiving press inquiries from THE CITY.

The June hearing in which Fabrizio ripped into Richman started off like most felony cases in Bronx Supreme Court, quiet and half-empty, according to two people who were there.

Before the defendant was shuffled into the courtroom in handcuffs, Fabrizio sounded sympathetic to Richman’s claim that the case could not move forward because prosecutors had not provided her with the discovery evidence she requested, which they are legally required to supply.

“I don’t want to prejudice Mr. Tatulli’s rights to have his attorney have all of that discovery,” the judge declared, according to the hearing transcript.

But after Tatulli entered the courtroom and Richman repeated her argument, Fabrizio complained at length about delays in the case. He then threatened to shoot down a defense motion about what evidence would be allowed into the case without looking into its merits.

“Or maybe I will just deny the motion summarily to suppress because the defense is not prepared to go forward,” said the judge.

Richman stuck to her guns. She needed the discovery materials “to properly represent” her client, she said — a response that sent Fabrizio over the edge.

New York’s rules for judicial conduct hold that judges must “be patient, dignified and courteous to litigants” and “accord to every person who has a legal interest in a proceeding, or that person’s lawyer, the right to be heard according to law.”

But over the years, attorneys have repeatedly accused Fabrizio of violating these rules to little avail.

In 2020, for example, a Bronx prosecutor filed a complaint about Fabrizio with the state’s Commission on Judicial Conduct. Citing 14 separate courtroom incidents, the complaint alleged the judge “had a long-standing pattern of verbally abusive toward litigants, routinely attacking people’s character and integrity and threatening attorneys with contempt and jail.”