After a bill that would have legalized same-sex marriage was voted down by the New Jersey state Senate, six gay and lesbian couples have asked the state Supreme Court to allow them to wed. New Jersey already allows civil unions, which are supposed to guarantee that same-sex couples receive all of the benefits of marriage. But some Garden State gay activists, like Cindy Meneghin, told the Star-Ledger they're still not given the rights they deserve, proving "that civil unions are not equal to marriage." more ›

A state judge has again ordered Mayor Bloomberg to follow the city's land use review procedure and hold public hearing about his controversial plan to construct new sports fields on Randalls Island and rent them to 20 private schools. Under the Mayor's plan, private schools like Buckley, Chapin and Dalton would pay $45 million for exclusive access to a part of the new athletic facilities during peak after-school hours — a move that critics contend would turn public land into private land. more ›

Last month, an out-of-control car jumped the curb outside the State Supreme Court and injured a six people, including coffee vendor Jaweed "Joe" Naseri. Naseri was in his coffee cart at the time and said at the time, "All of a sudden there was a very deep impact and I rolled over two or three times in the cart. At one point I said my prayers. I thought it was over." more ›

Police have charged the driver who mowed down pedestrians outside the State Supreme Court with "reckless endangerment and aggravated unlicensed operation, for having a suspended license." Though 33-year-old Queens resident Lorenzo Bello had a seizure during yesterday's morning crash, it wasn't his first. Per the Daily News, "His wife told cops he has a history of seizures and shouldn't be behind the wheel." more ›

An out-of-control car jumped a curb on Centre Street and mowed down three pedestrians outside the State Supreme Court. According to NY1, the car "crashed into a coffee cart and continued up several steps of the courthouse," where one man was pinned under the car. more ›

Two lawsuits currently wending their way through New York courts are forcing judges to grapple with the legal ramifications of “gay divorce.” more ›

Today marks the third annual Informal Presentation on the Art of Dance, a dance event put on by the Dance Theatre of Harlem and the Dancing Through Barriers Ensemble. The two troupes converge each year in a most unconventional space: The State Supreme Court of Manhattan! more ›

The fight over the right for school children to bear cell phones in schools moved to the Appellate Court, where lawyers for NYC and public school students' parents appeared before a five-judge panel. This comes after the City Council passed a bill allowing cell phones in schools, which the Mayor vetoed. more ›

After almost a week of delays, jurors were back in court for the Nixzmary Brown murder case. A expert said that the malnourished 7-year-old's blood was found under the fingernails Brown's stepfather, Cesar Rodriguez, as well as on his jeans. Rodriguez faces murder charges for the malnourished 7-year-old's 2006 death. more ›

A 38-year-old construction worker from Brooklyn is suing New York Presbyterian Hospital for giving him more medical attention than he cared for, and then having him arrested. Brian Persaud went to the ER at NY Presbyterian after a plank hit him on the head at a work site, causing a head laceration that required eight stitches. Although Persaud walked into the ER and was fully mobile, doctors told him that he should get an anal exam to check for a spinal injury (apparently this is not unheard of). more ›

• Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a pedestrian struck on Autumn and Liberty Aves. in Brooklyn, a suspicious fire on Wallace Ave. and Pelham Parkway in the Bronx,and a carjacking on 85th St. in the Bronx.
• Lawyers for Ted Corliss continue to argue for charges to be dismissed against their client, who attempted to jump off the Empire State Building, even after the State Supreme Court ruled that jumping off tall buildings was a form of free speech. Corliss is currently experimenting with jumping out of airplanes and landing without a parachute.
• I'm still trying to figure out how to parlay my cardboard box residence to this Internet entrepreneur's comfortable domicile. Next week in Extra, Extra: drunk guys hurting themselves and barely legal girls making out.
• PSA: 7 Line service will be out of commission starting this upcoming Saturday. Alternate service will be available on the LIRR, unless of course, Amtrak workers go on strike, in which case one can take the subwa . . .nevermind.

In May of 2006, a bouncer at Opus West 22nd Street was arrested after shooting four clubgoers, killing one of them. Then it turned out that Stephen Sakai was possibly connected to three other murders of associates from when he worked at a strip club in Brooklyn. Yesterday, Sakai took the stand in his trial for the three Brooklyn murders. And, boy, to be on that jury. The Post reports that he used a fake... more ›

State Supreme Court Justice Helen Freedman has ruled that the Broadway production of How the Grinch Stole Christmas can and will proceed, despite the theater owner’s attempt to lock out the stagehands. “Grinch” producers dragged Jucamcyn, the third largest owner of Broadway theaters, into court yesterday seeking an injunction to let the show go on. Local One, the stagehands’ union, is on strike until a contract is agreed upon with the producers’ league, of which... more ›

The shift comes as the governor has faced a firestorm of criticism both from Republicans and from within his own party. More than a dozen county clerks, who operate Department of Motor Vehicles offices upstate, have refused to carry out the policy, even though they are considered agents of the governor’s administration. more ›

After questions about whether Con Ed would be able to maintain objectivity when testing equipment from the area of July 18's Midtown steam pipe explosion, a State Supreme Court judge ruled that the utility could test a steam trap. Earlier, a state regulator suggested there could have been build-up in the trap, caused it to malfunction and causing the explosion. more ›

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Long before people cried out against 50 shots in protest of Sean Bell's death at the hands of the police, they decried 41 shots. We were surprised to hear that Kenneth Boss is still an officer with the NYPD. Seven years ago he fired five of the 41 shots that killed unarmed Amadou Diallo in the Bronx. He was acquitted of murder charges by an Albany jury, along with three other officers who subsequently left the job. Other cops now call Boss "Kenny No-Gun" because the department will no longer let him carry one. Disarmed, he fills his days fixing tools and playacting as a participant in police drills. Boss returned from a seven-month deployment to Iraq with the Marines last year, where he earned a Navy Achievement Medal. Earlier this year, he filed a federal lawsuit against the NYPD asking that it fully reinstate him and give him his gun back. He tried this back in 2002, when he filed essentially the same suit in a State Supreme Court, which eventually decided that the Police Commissioner had the right to determine which officers on the force could be disarmed. more ›

New York has never celebrated the forms of dance that it has birthed until now: Voguing, Jazz, the Jitterbug, Punk, Gothic--even Salsa was birthed in the Cuban Communities in this great city. And it is now time for Dance. New York has enjoyed the last two years of a September Art Parade and in May 2007, we can finally honor Dance in a similar fashion. more ›

On November 23, 1990 a bouncer outside of the Palladium nightclub (now an NYU dorm on 14th St.) was shot and killed when a fistfight escalated to gunplay. A year later, David Lemus and Olmedo Hidalgo were convicted of the killing and sent to prison, despite their defense that they were not even at the Palladium that night. Hidalgo's conviction was later overturned and Lemus was released from prison after 14 years, only to face a retrial by New York prosecutors. The New York Times is now reporting, however, that a former prosecutor for the city who was arguing for that retrial had serious doubts about the man's guilt even as he argued for his prosecution. more ›

The instigator of the 2005 murder of Nicole duFresne on the Lower East Side was sentenced to six years in jail yesterday in State Supreme Court. Audrey Evans, who is 18, pleaded to first-degree robbery for her role in the shooting. Evans' boyfriend, Rudy Flemming was sentenced to life, without the possibility of parole, late last year for killing duFresne, 28. One of the things that apparently prompted the shooting was the happiness of duFresne and her friends, who were out celebrating her new job. Even before seeing duFresne's group, Evans said that she would hit the next person she saw. Prior to being shot, witnesses accounts report that duFresne told Flemming, "What are you going to do, shoot us?" duFresne's fiancee said yesterday the question wasn't a dare, but an attempt to reason with Flemming. more ›

Now that he's been found medically fit to stand trial, jury selection has started in the trial of Peter Braunstein, the journalist who allegedly posed as a firefighter and molested a former co-worker on Halloween in 2005. The thing is 70% of the jurors questioned yesterday had heard about the trial and left, thanks to the moment-to-moment coverage of the case (exhibit A, B, C). But the NY Times said 30 prospective jurors who would be able to be fair remained. Can you imagine if you were on called to serve on that jury? more ›

Manhattan State Supreme Court Justice Joan Madden today declined to issue a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) that would have blocked developer Forest City Ratner from commencing demolitions within the footprint of the “Atlantic Yards” project before the legal challenge to the state’s environmental review and approval of the project, as well as a motion for a preliminary injunction, can be heard in court on May 3rd. more ›

A Manhattan jury found four women guilty of gang assault for attacking a man outside the IFC Center last summer. The man, Dwayne Buckle of Queens, said that the group of lesbians attacked him because he was straight, while the women contended Buckle had used slurs and threw a cigarette at them - and that another man stabbed him. more ›

BusinessWeek assistant managing editor and blogger Bruce Nussbaum may have been one of the 40 most powerful people in design (back in 2005), but he was no match for State Supreme Court Justice Edward J. McLaughlin. more ›

A State Supreme Court judge sentenced 27-year-old Paul Cortez to 25 years to life in prison. Cortez had been found guilty of murdering his ex-girlfriend Catherine Woods last month. more ›

A Long Island couple is suing a Manhattan fertility clinic for using the wrong sperm during in-vitro fertilization. Nancy and Thomas Andrews were having trouble conceiving a second child, so they went to the New York Medical Services for Reproductive Medicine to have Nancy's eggs fertilized with Thomas's sperm. But when baby Jessica was born in 2004 to the couple, they suspected something was wrong. From the Daily News:

Thomas Andrews is white and his wife is Dominican. But Jessica, who was born Oct. 19, 2004, has darker skin than either of them as well as "characteristics more typical of African or African-American descent," the lawsuit states. more ›

A NY State Supreme Court judge ruled that Atlantic Yards developer Forest City Ratner must return two properties after deciding that the properties' tenant had improperly given them to the developer. You ask, how can a mere tenant sign over properties he doesn't even own to a developer for demolition? So do we! more ›

The $1.3 billion deal for Brooklyn developer Berkshire LLC to buy federally subsidized Brooklyn housing complex Starrett City may be blocked by State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. Cuomo announced that his office will enforce an injunction barring the lead investor David Bistricer from completing "certain real estate for life and will not permit the conversion of any of the property to cooperative apartments." Cuomo's statement was pretty damning, calling Bistricer's real estate history "sordid" and saying, "The material I turned over today should be enough to ban him from this deal at the start."

Findings that led to the court order against Bistricer include that he failed to disclose the terms of refinanced mortgages in amendments filed prior to the auction of apartments he owned, a violation of the Martin Act. He was ordered to pay $450,000 in restitution to residents and $50,000 to the State Attorney General’s office. more ›

The Village Voice's Wayne Barrett has the scoop on a big case Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes is working on: How disgraced former Brooklyn Democratic party boss Clarence Norman managed to buy a State Supreme Court judgeship for $56,000. Fifty thousand in cash and then $6,000 in stamps ("$3,000 wheels of stamps on sprockets that could be purchased at a General Post Office"). Barrett writes, "When the disturbing details become fully known, Hynes's stunning prosecution may at last force the state legislature to junk the peculiar way New York State nominates the 14-year-term, $136,700-a-year judges who preside at all felony and major civil trials, as a federal court has already concluded we should." more ›

The Citizens Emergency Committee to Preserve Preservation hauled Mayor Bloomberg to New York State Supreme Court today for failing to reappoint or replace eight of eleven commissioners to the Landmarks Preservation Commission. The commissioners’ terms have expired, which, the Committee alleges, violates the Administrative Code and the City Charter. more ›