Pavone replaces George Raus, who was suspended from that job in June 2009 and fired in October.
Salvatore Pavone was recently named as an Onondaga County Family Court referee. Previously, he was a special acting Syracuse Court judge assigned to clean up a backlog in that eight-judge court.Syracuse, NY - Syracuse City Court has eight full-time judges on the bench. But it took an extra appointee – at a cost of about $37,000 – to address a huge backlog of misdemeanor cases over the last two years.
Now Salvatore Pavone has been appointed to a court attorney/referee position in Onondaga County Family Court that had been left vacant when the previous occupant was fired following a state investigation into his conduct.
“He’s been a go-to-guy all along,” said Fifth Judicial District Administrative Justice James Tormey III.
Pavone was appointed to take over the family court post June 28 at a salary of about $99,000.
George Raus was suspended from that job in June 2009 pending the outcome of an investigation by the New York State Inspector General’s Office. He was formally fired in October, but court officials declined to say why beyond noting more than a dozen lawyers filed complaints about his conduct in court.
Tormey said there were about 100 applicants for the position.
Pavone had made a good impression, Tormey said, after he was appointed by state court officials to be a special acting City Court judge in 2008 to address a backlog, consisting primarily of cases involving aggravated unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle charges for motorists driving without a license.
Chief Assistant District Attorney Alison Fineberg said there were more than 2,100 misdemeanor cases pending in City Court in January 2008 when authorities moved to address the problem.
What they did was set up a special section of the court to hold sessions four mornings a week to address the cases. The DA’s Office assigned Assistant DA Michael Price to that special court and Pavone presided at a pay rate of $125 a day.
State records show he was paid $16,000 in 2008 and $21,125 in 2009.
Fineberg said the special AUO court was dropped at the beginning of this year because the number of pending cases had been dramatically reduced. By last September, it was down to about 335 pending misdemeanor cases, she said.
That drop also was helped along by the prosecution agreeing last September to dismiss outright about 1,500 AUO cases.
Fineberg said part of that was the result of a court ruling that prosecutors could no longer rely solely on Department of Motor Vehicle records as evidence in such cases. They had to actually call DMV employees to testify about such records and that left the prosecution with proof problems, she said.
And some of the cases were just too old to prosecute, Fineberg said, admitting some dated back to the 1990s.
The DA’s office agreed to drop the old “garden-variety” cases that did not involve crashes, alcohol or chronic offenders, Fineberg said.
“There was a ridiculous number of traffic matters that had built up,” Pavone said. The problem, he explained, was that traffic cases did not stay assigned to an individual judge like criminal cases.
That, he said, apparently allowed them to build up. Pavone said one of the oldest cases dated back to 1983, 10 years before he even graduated from law school.
While many of the cases ended up being dismissed, others were resolved by negotiations with the prosecution and defense lawyers, Pavone said.
Supervising City Court Judge Jeffrey Merrill said officials are now keeping the problem from recurring by having misdemeanor Traffic Court cases stay with an individual judge from beginning to end, like criminal cases.
But he said state lawmakers helped create the problem by criminalizing AUO, flooding courts across the state with misdemeanor cases.
While serving in his family court position, Pavone will retain his part-time elected position as Manlius town judge. He gave up another part-time position as a deputy county attorney and shut down his private law practice to take the full-time Family Court job.
Pavone is assigned to handle custody and visitation cases. He also handles some family-offense petitions and is being trained to handle child neglect and abuse matters and the termination of parental rights.
Pavone said the appointed Family Court position is contingent on him not having any conflicts with his part-time town judge job which paid $30,386 last year.
If he has any day-time arraignments to handle for the town court, he uses his lunch hour and a courtroom in the Public Safety Building that has been set aside for use by town and village judges working in the downtown area. Any trials are held in the evening.
He said he welcomes the multiple challenges.
“If I take on a responsibility, I put everything into it,” he said.
Who is Salvatore Pavone?
Salvatore PavoneHe met his wife, Sherene, when they were both in college in Rochester.
“She was my first and last blind date in college,” he said. Sherene followed him from Rochester to law school in Syracuse and they shared a law office in Manlius before Pavone took the Family Court job.
Married for 18 years, they have three sons (Angelo, 15; Dante, 13, and Carlo, 8).
After graduating from law school, Pavone worked several years as an assistant prosecutor in the Onondaga County District Attorney’s Office. He then spent about eight months with a local law firm before starting his own private practice. He’s also worked part-time with the County Attorney’s Office since 2001 handling risk-management and workers compensation defense work.
He has served as a board member and chairman of the Zoning Board of Appeals in Manlius and as a member of the Town of Manlius Republican Committee. His first run for elective office came in 2007 when he was elected Manlius town justice, wresting the GOP nomination away from longtime incumbent Judge Franklin Josef and then surviving a three-way primary contest.