The finances of New York state’s most vulnerable populations — widows, children, and people with cognitive disabilities — are often placed under the care of attorneys appointed by judges. These lawyers are paid from the same pots of money that they’re charged with managing.

Throughout the 1990s, favoritism ran rampant throughout the appointment process: Political leaders within New York City boroughs often received these lucrative court jobs from the same judges they’d helped get elected.

New York’s reformist chief judge at the time, Judith Kaye, acknowledged the situation during her 2000 State of the Judiciary address.

"Public confidence in the courts is put at risk when judicial appointments are based on considerations other than merit,” Kaye said. “Simply put, the public must have faith that the courts operate free of favoritism and partiality."

She followed up with rules meant to curb patronage in the court system.

Yet a New York Focus investigation found that since then, county political officials and those involved in the judicial selection process have continued to gain or hold appointments in state Supreme and Surrogate’s Courts:

• A Queens law firm has helped pick borough judges for decades and earned tens of millions of dollars from a single appointment.
• The secretary of the Bronx Democratic Party helps oversee its annual judicial convention, exerts influence over its nomination of judges, and has landed appointments from some of those same judges. The performances of several politically connected Bronx attorneys as court-appointed fiduciaries have come into question.
• And in Brooklyn, one law firm has reaped millions in appointments while paying six figures to the county party chair — who played a role in selecting dozens of Supreme Court justices — all while sharing office space with him.

It’s unclear whether some of these appointments are legal. The Office of Court Administration, which is charged with enforcing the state’s anti-patronage rules, did not respond to multiple questions about New York Focus’s findings.

“These sorts of antics only jeopardize public trust in the courts,” said Ben Weinberg, the public policy director at the government reform group Citizens Union.

“There's a reason anti-patronage rules exist,” he said. “It’s to protect the integrity of our government systems, not to create a game of political musical chairs.”

New York’s state prison commissioner, Daniel Martuscello III, is catching flak from every direction.

Since December, when the state attorney general released video of prison guards beating an incarcerated man to death, Martsucello has faced calls for resignation from prisoners’ rights activists and corrections officers alike. Some of the former see him as the kingpin of a brutally violent system; the latter as a gutless reformer who doesn’t have their backs. He’s faced protests, national outrage, aggressive inquiries from horrified legislators — and, most recently, a wildcat strike from his guards. Through mediated talks with the officers’ union on one hand and promises for reform on the other, he’s been working around the clock to keep both his commissionership and the state prison system itself from falling apart.

How did Martuscello find himself here? While his tenure as prison chief is less than two years old, he’s no stranger to New York’s Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, or DOCCS. He came of age in the agency, and knows its ugly side better than anyone.

This week, New York Focus published an in-depth investigation into Martuscello’s ascent. The result of a year and a half of reporting, the article reveals his role as scion of a state prison dynasty. It details not only the commissioner’s rise to power, but his father’s, brother’s, siblings’, in-laws’, and that of his family’s friends across the system.

Thousands of pages of previously unreleased documents and testimony from incarcerated people, advocates, officials, and over a dozen current and former DOCCS staff tell the story of a man who’s found himself at the center of a firestorm, torn between his professed progressivism and his background in a shadowy system.

Here’s what you need to know ...

A man in a green prison uniform, his face bleeding and wrists shackled behind his back, slouches on a medical examination table. A uniformed guard shoves an object into his mouth, while another grips his throat, and several more take turns beating him. They hit him all over his body. When he loses consciousness, they lift him by his collar and throw him against a window.

The killing of Robert Brooks at a central New York prison became a media sensation. Body-worn camera footage of the deadly beatdown, released in December, triggered a flurry of coverage, from local headlines to rolling cable news stories, directing national outrage at a state prison system that often evades scrutiny.

It caused a particular headache for the state prison commissioner, Daniel Martuscello III. A self-styled reformer, he responded to the public disgust by announcing a suite of initiatives aimed at reducing violence and holding abusive officers to account. Backlash followed, with the corrections officers union issuing a rare vote of no confidence against him last month. The following week, an annual budget hearing — normally a polite affair — saw the commissioner dodging activist protesters, escaping a gaggle of reporters, and fielding three hours of questions from horrified legislators.

Then, the guards went on strike. The state’s prisons locked down, threatening system-wide collapse. Like the activists, picketing corrections officers, convinced that Martuscello had abandoned them, called for his resignation.

This probably isn’t how Martuscello imagined his time as prison chief would go. Officially confirmed last May, he’d been the top job’s heir apparent for years. He’s the scion of a New York prison dynasty and came of age in the system, brought up by an ambitious, well-connected family that helped propel him to power.

New York state is one step closer to banning fossil fuels in new buildings.

On Friday, the State Fire Prevention and Building Code Council voted to recommend major updates to the state’s building code, which is updated every five years and sets minimum standards for construction statewide. The draft updates include rules requiring most new buildings to be all electric starting in 2026, as mandated by a law passed two years ago.

The vote came after the code council went missing in action for more than two months, leaving some advocates nervous that the state might be wavering on the gas ban. With the rules now entering the final stage of the approval process, New York remains on track to be the first state to enact such a ban.

The new draft code also tightens a slew of other standards in a bid to make buildings more energy efficient and save residents money over the long term. But it leaves out several key provisions recommended in the state’s climate plan — possibly running afoul of a 2022 law.