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People with the power to take away other people’s liberty should be open and accountable for the decisions they make. That’s obvious, right? Well, it’s not how things work in New York, where judges in criminal cases get to decide which of their decisions to publish, and whether to publish them at all.

A report from two government watchdog groups, Scrutinize and Reinvent Albany, indicates that only 130 judges across the state published at least one of their criminal case decisions in 2024.

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That lack of transparency is a threat to people’s faith in the justice system. But the failure to publish judicial decisions has more concrete effects, too: It makes it harder to assess how New........

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