New York Court of Appeals Associate Judge Madeline Singas said the path from translating her immigrant community’s mail in Queens to shaping the law on the
A lifetime of advocating for her immigrant community, domestic violence survivors guides how Judge Madeline Singas shapes law on NY’s high courtsaid the path from translating her immigrant community’s mail in Queens to shaping the law on the state’s highest court in Albany was a natural one: She’s simply been putting herself in the rooms that allowed her to advocate for those who need her voice.
Singas grew up in Astoria, Queens, as the daughter of Greek immigrants who ran a pizzeria a few neighborhoods over in Elmhurst. As English wasn’t her parents, their friends or their customers’ first language, Singas took on the role of translator and advocate across both immigrant-dominated neighborhoods, ensuring her family had what they needed and serving as the de facto letter-reader when her father brought the community’s mail home for her to make sense of.
“From a very young age, advocating for my family was part of my responsibility, because English was not their first language,” Singas said. “So, I think it was natural for me to decide to go to She did just that, earning her Juris Doctorate from Fordham Law School in 1991.
Immediately after graduation, Singas joined the Queens District Attorney’s office as a prosecutor: she wasn’t sure exactly what type of law she wanted to practice right out of school, she said, but knew she wanted to work in public service. She ended up falling in love with the work and finding her calling: standing up for survivors of domestic violence in court, a role she’d spend the next three decades of her life in.
“I applied to the DA’s office because I thought that I would be able to help people, and that’s what I did,” Singas said. “I thought I would be there for three years, and then I would leave, but once I got there and began advocating for victims and survivors, mostly women and children, I realized that that was what I needed to do. I couldn’t turn my back on them.
” After a decade and a half as a Queens assistant district attorney, Singas was tapped to cross county lines and help open the first Special Victims Bureau at the Nassau District Attorney’s office in 2006. She spent about a decade defining the office, training attorneys and cops in how to interview victims and advocate for them in court and pushing for policy that would protect them.
It was her upbringing in a tight-knit, immigrant community that instilled in her the importance of home and family, which caused her to be so struck by domestic violence work, she said.
“We didn’t have much growing up, but what I did have was a support network of my parents, my extended family. Home for me was a safe haven,” Singas said.
“When I got to the DA’s office, I saw that that wasn’t the case for so many women and for so many kids, that the places where they should feel the most safe ended up being places of extreme violence. I couldn’t really wrap my head around that.
” “I wanted them to feel safe and I wanted them to be able to reach their potential, and they couldn’t do it in abusive situations or if they were being assaulted,” the former prosecutor continued.
“Having the experience that I have, I felt I needed to be in there advocating for these people, because they can’t advocate often for themselves. ”Singas led the Special Victims Bureau until she waged two successful campaigns in 2015 and 2019 to lead the office.
Her time as Nassau District Attorney, one of the few Democrats to hold the elected office, helped define her prosecutorial career as one spent pushing for criminal justice reform within the system, a unique role for a prosecutor to take on. She helped spearhead alternative to incarcerations for first-time and youth offenders, pushed forward Nassau County’s own Raise the Age initiative before the state law went into effect and established community-based programs where she’d ask those who committed low-level offenses what they wanted to do in the future, then connect them with people in their communities who could offer them guidance and career support.
“My mindset was understanding what drove crime to help prevent crime,” Singas said. “I thought of it very much as a public safety issue, and it just made intuitive sense to me that we needed to look at a person and what was going on in their lives that brought them into the criminal justice system, so that we could hope to get them out of the criminal justice system.
” About six years into her tenure as Nassau’s top prosecutor, a spot opened up on the state’s highest court. Serving on the Court of Appeals was never something Singas saw herself doing, she said, but she wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to lend her voice and law degree to those who needed it statewide.
“I was ready to take the impact that I was having in Nassau County to more broadly impact New York State,” Singas said. “The idea of being able to develop the law, which I have so much respect for, and to be able to be on the inside of those institutions impacting the rest of the state was something that was very appealing to me, and I knew it would be consequential for the residents of the state.
” Singas said her decisions and the way she writes her opinions are guided by her decades spent in the courtroom defending domestic violence survivors and pushing for criminal justice reform. She’s writing with practicing attorneys and regular people in mind, she said, keeping her opinions grounded in reality, easy to understand and practical to use.
“Being able to develop the law incrementally, so that there’s a body of law that’s predictable, that’s stable, that people could rely on helping litigants and lower court judges navigate law, is an awesome responsibility,” Singas said. “I always strive to write opinions that are very readable and that offer real guidance to our trial court judges and to litigants, so that when they pick up one of my opinions, they know what it is that I’m deciding and how to proceed forward.
” “I’m not looking to write lofty thought pieces,” the judge continued.
“I’m very much a pragmatist, and I think that comes from being immersed in my community, doing work for so many years. I understand what’s happening in the courtrooms. I didn’t come to this position from any lofty other position. I came from the arena, I came from getting my hands dirty.
I understand what litigants are going through, I understand what trial judges are going through, because I was in there with them as they were making their decisions. ”offering career opportunities to Afghan refugees seeking legal education or work in the United States, raising her advocacy and support of immigrant communities to a statewide office.
And, just last month, when the high court heard arguments in a case over whether or not members of the public are legally allowed to record video in police station lobbies, she pressed attorneys with hard questions over whether allowing people to do so would put domestic violence survivors seeking help from the police at risk. , was presented as a police accountability issue: People should be able to record what happens in a station’s lobby so that, if an officer is using extreme force or acting illegally, they can be caught on tape, attorneys argued.
But, Singas asked, what if someone took a video in a station that included a domestic violence survivor – intentionally or unintentionally – and posted it online, where their abuser saw it? Now, that person could be at risk of retaliation. Finding the answer to those tough questions is what makes the job so exciting, Singas said, and keeps her convinced that setting legal precedent on the high court is where she belongs.
“I’m looking at a very close case and figuring out which is the best way to accommodate New Yorkers and to accommodate our institution and to preserve the strength of that institution moving forward,” Singas said. “They’re all very distinct issues, and when we’ve decided on them, we are setting the precedent for the future. I’m very much aware of that. ”Isabella Gallo covers courts and law for amNewYork Law.
She breaks down legal developments, court decisions, cases, lawsuits and the work of attorneys and judges to make the law more accessible to the public and provide a reliable resource to lawyers looking to understand how recent rulings could impact their practice.
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