Bail-hating NYC judge has knack for cutting accused criminals loose — even in attempted-slay cases: damning Post review

A judge with a family name in Albany politics keeps letting people accused of trying to kill other people walk out of her courtroom. That's not a talking point, that's the actual reporting here. More than a dozen cases reviewed, and the pattern isn't subtle: Janice Robinson finds a way to cut defendants loose even when the charge is attempted murder. At some point "consistently" stops being an adjective and starts being a description of a policy.

New Yorkers were told bail reform was about fairness, about not locking up poor people for shoplifting while they wait for a court date. Fine, there's a real argument in there somewhere. But nobody voted for a system where a judge treats attempted-slay cases like parking tickets. That's not compassion, that's a coin flip with someone else's safety, usually in a neighborhood that doesn't have the luxury of shrugging it off.

The niece detail matters too, whether people want to admit it or not. Brooklyn's court system doesn't run in a vacuum, and when the people making these calls are connected to the same political machine that pushed the reforms in the first place, "independent judiciary" starts to sound like a nice phrase nobody actually believes. Voters deserve to know who's on the bench and why they keep making the same call.

The fix isn't complicated. Judges who show a pattern of releasing people accused of violent crimes should face real scrutiny, not a shrug and a reassignment. Until that happens, expect more headlines like this one, and more victims wondering why the system worked so hard to protect the guy who tried to kill them.