Kings County Dem Exec Director Yamil Speight-Miller talks diversity on the bench

By ARIAMA C. LONG Amsterdam News Staff, Report for America Corps Member

People and politics are complicated, often criticized as a source of corruption and immorality. Executive Director of the Kings County Democratic Party (Kings County Dems) Yamil Speight-Miller, appointed in October 2022, along with current Brooklyn Party boss and Assemblymember Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, are trying to inch the county a little further in the right direction—starting with diverse candidates for judgeships.

“The role of the executive director is to ensure that the institution is still alive with the mission of the party,” said Speight-Miller at the party’s headquarters in Downtown Brooklyn. He and Dana Rachlin, dedicated district leader for Assembly District 50, sat across from one another and first explained the state of the county party in recent years.

Particularly in Brooklyn, the county party is quite confidently referred to as the “Democratic machine” with a reputation for descending into madness. In 2013, former Brooklyn Party boss and Assemblymember Vito Lopez re- signed after a huge sexual harassment scandal. Years later, the COVID outbreak and a racially charged atmosphere certainly didn’t help the “frustration” involved with efforts to organize voting processes or onboard new district leaders, said Speight-Miller.

Frank Seddio, who replaced Lopez after his resignation, was a marked improvement and touted reforms. However, he was briefly accused of mishandling party funds before resigning in 2020. Even the former Kings County Dem Exec Director Andy Marte, who was a registered Republican before switching parties, resigned abruptly in 2022.

“Chaos, confusion, disagreements, uprising, disparity is all going to come but it is essential that the executive director remain neutral,” continued Speight-Miller. He was in public service for over 20 years and with the New York State Department of Health, before he was tapped to be the interim executive director after Marte left. By September 2022, he oversaw a series of hourslong and chaotic county committee meetings, where officers could barely vote because of difficulties with equipment and location.

Speight-Miller feels that he and Bichotte Hermelyn, the first boss of color of the party, have the re- sponsibility of essentially righting a sinking ship. Speight-Miller is not deterred, though. His vision is to have more transparency and diversity, period. He feels the hardest part about implementing a new vision is encountering old mindsets—for example, when it comes to screening qualified candidates for judgeships.

“We’ve taken something like our screening panel and said ‘OK, we understand the past and what happened but turn that over to our ad hoc judiciary committee,’” began Speight-Miller. “And let us get data that we can now flip to the public and work together as a party.”

Rachlin, who runs the ad hoc judiciary committee, was appointed as a district leader to fill a vacancy. District leaders usually take a vote on who gets to run for judgeships. She said that voting for judges is an incredibly important role for an unpaid volunteer and she didn’t see her colleagues taking it seriously.

Civil court candidates aren’t sitting judges already so it’s a little harder to gauge where they would fall on issues, said Rachlin.

Part of her job now is to connect the candidate judges with more community members, who are likely to be justice-involved and therefore directly impacted, and create spaces for conversation at forums and with questionnaires. Her job also involves educating more residents about the covert process of judicial elections— which run differently than standard political elections—and informing citizens about how long judgeships are, and how that impacts the democratic process.

“During that process I was a little disturbed, because I felt that we were making decisions that would be quite impactful on many, many people for many, many years through the lens of niceties, friendships, or alliances,” said Rachlin.

Speight-Miller said that it’s imperative that diversity on the bench be a priority because Black and brown people are disproportionately judged in the courtroom.

Rachlin added that civil court judges, who can sign warrants and may be placed in criminal courts setting bail, are a huge issue when it comes to racial justice.

“Because there are judges who are aggressive in their rulings, who are punitive in their rulings, who are often found to not be right and we don’t see them on the cover of newspapers or losing their seats,” said Rachlin. “We don’t see the kind of fear in judges like that, that we do in judges that are trying to apply the law in a just and fair way.”

In this year’s primary, the Kings County Dems backed four Black women judges for county wide civil court: Judges Monique Holaman, Betsey Jean-Jacques, Marva Brown, and Turquoise Haskin. With 32.79% of the votes, Haskin lost to Judge Linda Wilson, another Black woman, who had 65.62% of the vote.

“The Brooklyn Democratic Party is proud to have endorsed a slate of highly-qualified and diverse judicial candidates for Civil and Surrogate’s Court—including four civil court candidates who are all women of color,” said Bichotte Hermelyn. “We’re endorsing culturally competent judges who were selected through a thorough vetting process and unprecedented community feedback to serve the needs of all Brooklynites fairly and impartially.”