Brooklyn judge Katherine Levine has been formally admonished for spending 20 months fighting $150 in trash fines by repeatedly invoking her judicial status.
Levine, who has sat on the Kings County Supreme Court bench since 2008, earned herself the rebuke from the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct after investigators found she “repeatedly and gratuitously invoked her judicial title; her judicial status” on at least eight separate occasions, according to a release Monday from the panel.
The commission found that the judge’s “unnecessary and repeated references to her judicial office created the appearance that she was inappropriately seeking special treatment,” the panel wrote in its findings. The trouble began in March 2024, when sanitation workers discovered a “large accumulation” of napkins, papers, egg cartons and other trash in the driveway of her Borough Park home, where records show she has lived since 1996.
“i plead not guilty,” Levine wrote in an online submission 10 days later. “I am a supreme Court Justice in Kings County and went to work at 10 am.”
The Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings found her guilty anyway, but she failed to pay the $50 mail-in fine, the commission said. The following spring, she received two additional fines for not putting lids on her trash receptacles, according to OATH records. Levine never responded to those tickets until the next fall.
In a voicemail she left for the administrative court in October 2025, she made at least two references to her status, the commission said, including, “Hi this is Judge Katherine Levine,” and, “I have trials every day in Supreme Court.”
Levine pressed the argument several times that she was “a supreme court justice with trials and cannot sit a whole day at OATH for a hearing,” the panel noted. “I cannot come down and sit in OATH for 10 hours as I am a trial judge in Supreme Court,” she wrote in a message from her official judicial email, demanding to settle the $650 balance that had ballooned from the original ticket because she failed to appear at past hearings.
Another time, she boasted: “I am a supreme court justice and I vacate default judgments all the time in the name of equity and justice.”
OATH told her it does not do settlements and that she “must follow OATH rules and protocols as everyone must do.” Levine then demanded to speak with an OATH supervisor in an email response, closing with an all-caps message: “HOW DO I PAY IT AND HOW MUCH IS IT.”
“Invoking judicial office to avoid paying a fine undermines public confidence in the integrity of the judiciary and suggests that judges are exempt from rules that apply to everyone else,” said commission administrator Robert Tembeckjian. “The Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings was right not to give special treatment to a judge, and Judge Levine accepted responsibility for her conduct by agreeing an admonition was appropriate.”
Levine, who previously had a clean disciplinary record, “openly and repeatedly expressed her remorse and embarrassment” and accepted the commission’s admonishment. “Further, respondent recognizes that the gratuitous invocation of her judicial title was reasonably perceived at OATH as an attempt for a favorable adjudication of her summonses,” the commission said.
Her lawyer, David Godosky, said Levine “regrets that she referenced her position while addressing a frustrating issue with a city agency,” noting that she was “candid and cooperative.” The fines were eventually paid, OATH records show.
