A Court of Claims judge announced yesterday he is resigning at the end of this month due largely to what he believes is the insufficiency of compensation for the Judiciary. Judge Robert K. Holdman, who has been on the bench since 2005 and who also serves as an acting Supreme Court justice in White Plains, said in a resignation letter to Governor Andrew M. Cuomo that the 12 years state judges have gone without a pay raise is the “sole” reason he will step down from the bench. He said he will become general counsel for the North American operations of the Rilin Group, a China-based sea transportation and wind-power company. The judge released a copy of the letter yesterday to the Law Journal.
“Due to the failure of politics before, and your commission now, I am forced to leave the bench to properly provide for my wife and our three children, all under the age of five. It breaks my heart they will not know their Dad as a judge,” Judge Holdman (See Profile) wrote to Mr. Cuomo. “Very simply, if there were merely a cost-of-living increase over the time I sat as a judge, they would.”
