[BN] Politics Now 📩: Grisanti’s troubles, Kennedy’s money, more scandal at OTB

Once again, State Supreme Court Justice Mark Grisanti is in the headlines. And once again, it is not for something positive. 

Grisanti is now under fire for barring the public from jury selection in a high-profile civil trial for “the protections of jurors,” Buffalo News court reporter Aaron Besecker reported last week.

The move drew criticism from free press advocates, including the Washington-based Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and it appears contrary to a unanimous 1984 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that states trial judges must ordinarily permit the public and the press to attend jury selection proceedings.

Grisanti last made headlines in 2020, when police body camera footage showed Grisanti, his wife and two neighbors in a street fight in which the judge shoved a Buffalo police officer who responded to the dispute.

That incident put him under investigation by the State Committee on Judicial Conduct, which has not announced any ruling in the case. 

In 2012, when he was a state senator, Grisanti was in another fight, that time at the Seneca Niagara Casino. 

Grisanti, of course, was appointed to the Court of Claims in 2015 by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo. The move was seen as a political thank-you for Grisanti’s decisive vote in favor of same-sex marriage, which cost multiple Republican senators their jobs in the next election.

But it is Gov. Kathy Hochul who may hold Grisanti’s future in her hands. That is because Grisanti’s nine-year term on the Court of Claims expires this year, and the governor…