Longtime Judge Brian DeJoseph will return to the New York State Supreme Court bench, having beaten Republican challenger Robert O’Leary by a margin of 76,907 votes to 46,540.
DeJoseph will continue a 33-year career on the bench, having first been elected to Syracuse City Court in 1987. He became the supervising judge for the city court in 1987. He was first elected to the New York State Supreme Court in 2000. In April of this year, he was appointed to the Appellate Division.
“It takes a village,” DeJoseph said of his win. “Because of all of you — my family, labor, and some very strong support from people in the Conservative Party — I had wonderful support across the board and I could not have done it without you.”
DeJoseph also thanked his daughters, Christie DeJoseph Ghaly and Elizabeth DeJoseph, for their help in his campaign. His daughters and wife Stephanie joined him onstage at the Onondaga County Democratic Committee’s election night “victory party” for his speech.
O’Leary, an attorney with a practice in Manlius, serves as Manlius town justice.
DeJoseph nearly didn’t have a ballot line this election. He generally runs on the Democrat line, but two of the Assembly districts that make up the Fifth Judicial District failed to secure delegates for the Democratic Judicial Nominating Convention.
In New York, Supreme Court candidates, unlike other elected officials, are not nominated directly. Instead, the political party must convene a judicial nominating convention made up of delegates from each assembly district within the judicial district. The delegates are assigned according to the party’s vote total in the last governor’s election.
In 2011, Democratic judicial candidates sought to invalidate the Independence Party’s judicial nominating convention claiming that the number of delegates violated the election law’s proportional representation requirement. Of the possible 18 delegates, the Independence Party only named 12. The missing delegates came from Assembly Districts that had higher vote totals at the last governor’s race. A court in the state capitol agreed and invalidated the Independence Party’s Supreme Court candidates. The move came back to hurt the Dems last year, when candidates James Romeo and Jean Larson were removed from the ballot after Dems failed to name delegates in six of the 12 districts. They failed to do so again this year, endangering DeJoseph’s reelection.
Ultimately, the court decided in DeJoseph’s favor, guaranteeing him a spot on the Democratic line. He was also endorsed by the Conservative Party.
