The Supreme Court Justice who sentenced Anthony Marshall to prison for stealing his mother Brook Astor's fortune has been caught illegally using a parking placard issued by the NYPD. The Post, which, like the Daily News, loves busting parking placard abusers, caught Justice A. Kirke Bartley routinely parking his SUV at expired parking meters around his Upper East Side neighborhood. Judges who request the placards are not allowed to use them while they're off duty, but Bartley's ride was observed parked at an expired one-hour meter three times last week, without a single ticket. Confronted by the tabloid, the judge confessed—but refused to pay his debt to society.
"The only thing I can say is, I have been remiss," Bartley told the Post. "I have not been feeding the meter. I was working arraignments [Saturday], and I couldn't feed the meter. But that's no excuse. It's reality. I should have [put in coins], and I didn't. I was wrong." But when asked if he would make restitution, the judge declined to sentence himself to paying back the city: "I can't speak to that. I've owned up to the fact that I was remiss. And I'm contrite." Maybe Marshall's lawyers should have worked the contrition angle harder!
Eliminating widespread abuse of parking placards has been a high-profile goal of the Bloomberg administration, with mixed results. As Transportation Alternatives spokesman Wiley Norvell pointed out in 2008, "Enforcement is the most essential piece of this entire effort, and if the police do not start ticketing and towing the cars of workers who abuse their permits, then none of this amounts to anything."
