Supreme Court Justice Patricia Di Mango of Brooklyn recalls with a certain relish the defendant who appeared before her and observed, "Everybody at Rikers Island is afraid of you." But she says she cried when she received a poem from a teenager she had forced to sit next to her on the bench during a school vacation after the judge discovered that the teen had been cutting class. The judge, the teen said, had made him "bloom."
Di Mango, a quick-thinking, quick-talking Brooklyn native, was chosen by court administrators to lead an effort to get under control soaring felony backlogs in the Bronx. By the end of 2012, Bronx court dockets were clogged with 930 felony cases more than two years old, compared to less than 200 in Brooklyn.
BLOOM: a Poem for Judge Di Mango
