For almost two years, clients of a Queens law practice believed they were being represented by an attorney. They were not. The woman handling their cases, making court appearances, filing documents, and signing emails “Janice Bar, Attorney at Law” was a paralegal with two felony convictions — including one for falsely notarizing a document. And the man who owned that practice, who paid her $600 a week and kept the office rent flowing while she worked, was not a lawyer anymore either. He was a sitting judge.
Last week, the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct ordered Queens Civil Court Judge Joseph Kasper removed from the bench. It is the commission’s harshest sanction, and one it almost never uses: Kasper is only the third judge from Queens ever ordered removed, and the first in nearly a decade. The commission’s 69-page determination, released Thursday, describes a judge who never actually stopped being a lawyer — and who let a convicted felon masquerade as one under his own credentials.
“Judge Kasper facilitated a convicted felon’s masquerade as a lawyer for almost two years and continued to practice law himself, which a full-time judge cannot do,” said Robert H. Tembeckjian, the commission’s administrator and counsel. “Such egregious conduct and contempt for the rule of law is inimical to the role of a judge and requires his removal from office.”
The Judge Who Kept His Day Job
Kasper’s path to the bench was improbable. A mainstay of the Queens County Republican Party and a perennial judicial candidate, he ran for years without success while operating his own small practice — friends, neighbors, political associates. Then, in 2021, he won, defeating Democratic nominee Paul Vallone and becoming the first Republican to win a judicial election in Queens in decades. Even Kasper was stunned. “I feel like I have to poke myself with a pin right now to wake up,” he said at the time.
New York’s rule for what came next is absolute and ancient: a full-time judge cannot practice law. Not a little. Not for old friends. Not to wind things down. The moment Kasper took the bench at the start of 2022, every one of his client relationships was supposed to end or transfer to another attorney.
Some did. Kasper transferred a number of cases to Michael Mossa, an attorney with whom he shared an office. But others he simply kept, according to the commission — and for two years, he worked them from the bench. The commission found multiple cases in which Kasper advised clients, negotiated settlements, appeared at virtual court conferences, requested adjournments, and signed legal documents, all while serving as a sitting judge.
The starkest example came in a matrimonial case. The commission found that Kasper refused to finalize a client’s divorce until she handed him $1,000 in cash — the balance of the retainer she had agreed to pay when her case concluded. In exchange for the bundle of cash, Kasper gave her a note promising that a neighboring legal practice would take over her case. When the client next walked into court for a conference, no attorney was there for her. Text messages gathered by the commission indicate Kasper told her he was parked in front of the courthouse — and that Janice Bar would go up to assist her.
“Janice Bar, Attorney at Law”
Janice Bar was Kasper’s longtime friend, a fellow traveler in Queens Republican politics, and his paralegal. She was not, and has never been, a lawyer. In 2016, she was convicted of forgery and of making an apparently sworn false statement — convictions Kasper himself helped her appeal, unsuccessfully.
Yet after Kasper took the bench, the commission found, Bar performed most of the substantive legal work on the cases he kept — including tasks that only a licensed New York attorney may perform. She made court appearances. She conducted an examination in court. She notarized documents she had no authority to notarize — despite a prior conviction for exactly that. In at least ten instances, she corresponded with Kasper’s clients using an email signature reading “Janice Bar, Attorney at Law”; according to the commission’s report, nearly forty emails carrying that signature reached Kasper himself. And in multiple instances, she used Kasper’s court-system e-filing credentials to file new cases while identifying herself as Kasper.
The commission was unequivocal: while there are narrow circumstances in which a non-attorney may access an attorney’s court account, Bar “far exceeded” them. And when Kasper learned that Bar had impersonated a lawyer and conducted an examination in open court, he did nothing. “We are troubled by respondent’s facilitation of and failure to supervise Janice Bar as she improperly performed legal services for clients who had retained respondent as an attorney before he became a judge,” the commissioners wrote.
The Missing Escrow Money
Then there is the money. An attorney’s escrow account holds funds that belong to clients — it is among the most sacred obligations in the profession, and mishandling it is among the fastest ways for an ordinary lawyer to be disbarred. The commission charged that in the two years after his election, Kasper failed to keep track of roughly $17,000 sitting in his attorney escrow accounts. He eventually located about $10,000 owed to clients. As of 2024, he could not account for more than $7,000 of the rest.
Add to that the disclosure failures: Kasper never filed the mandatory candidate financial disclosure statement for his 2021 campaign — a lapse he did not correct until 2025, three years into his judgeship.
“He’s Basically Only Accused of Being Loyal”
Kasper’s attorney, Richard Emery — a founding partner at Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel and, notably, a former member of the very commission that ordered his client’s removal — does not dispute that Kasper committed misconduct. He disputes that it warrants removal.
“This decision is without precedent,” Emery said. “Removal is the last resort. It is not the usual sanction for misconduct of a judge, but only misconduct which threatens the public.” Kasper, he argued, “has done a creditable job on the bench, he has virtually no backlog, he’s not been criticized in any way for his conduct on the bench. The alleged misconduct relates to his misplaced loyalty to his former clients when he was surprisingly elected.” Of Bar, Emery said Kasper “was still committed to her as a person and as a friend, and he kept her on while he was a judge to wind down these cases.” He has vowed to appeal to the New York Court of Appeals, which stays the removal while the case is reviewed.
The commission saw it differently: “The totality of the evidence established that respondent’s repeated violations of the rules were egregious and he is unfit for the bench.”
Loyalty is a virtue. But consider what the loyalty defense asks the public to accept: that a judge may keep practicing law because his clients were friends; that he may hand his cases to a twice-convicted felon because she was a friend; that he may collect $1,000 in cash from a divorce client on his way into the courthouse; and that none of it “threatens the public” because his docket moved on time. The people Bar “represented” were members of the public. The client who paid cash for a divorce that came with no lawyer was a member of the public. The litigants whose cases were e-filed under a judge’s borrowed credentials were members of the public.
A Removal in Name Only?
There is a final, uncomfortable wrinkle. Kasper turned 70 in June — the mandatory retirement age for New York civil court judges — meaning his time on the bench expires at the end of this year regardless of what the Court of Appeals does. If he appeals, the removal is stayed while the state’s highest court reviews it. The practical consequence of the commission’s most severe sanction may amount to little more than a formal designation on his way out the door.
That designation still matters. A judge removed from office in New York is barred from ever holding judicial office again, and the precedent binds the next judge who is tempted to treat the bench as a part-time appointment. Queens has seen removal only twice before: Terrence O’Connor in 2018, and Laura Blackburne in 2005, who was removed for helping a defendant slip out a courthouse back stairway to evade a waiting detective.
Joseph Kasper now stands to join that list — not for a single lapse of judgment, but for two years of running a law practice from the bench and letting a felon wear the title of attorney in his name. The commission called it what it was. Whatever the Court of Appeals decides, the record is written.
This article is based on the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct’s determination and public reporting by amNewYork Law and the Queens Daily Eagle. Judge Kasper, through counsel, does not dispute the misconduct findings but is appealing the sanction of removal. We will update this article as the appeal proceeds.