By Jacob Kaye
The race for the coveted spot on Queens’ Surrogate Court bench is down to two.
Queens attorney Donna Furey was booted from the ballot in court on Monday, leaving the upcoming race for Queens Surrogate Court judge between current judges Cassandra Johnson and Wendy Li.
Though Furey, an Astoria-based attorney, was first ruled to be ineligible for the primary race by the city’s Board of Elections, a judge on Monday confirmed the ruling, finding that she didn’t have the requisite number of petition signatures to make the ballot. Furey’s attorneys didn’t even show up to court to argue the challenge, sources told the Eagle.
Now, Johnson and Li will face off in the Democratic Primary race for the seat in June.
With no Republican candidates vying for the seat, the race’s winner will almost certainly go on to win the general election for the seat in November.
The election is arguably the most critical judicial race for the Queens County Democratic Party, whose preferred candidates have held the seat for decades.
Johnson, who currently serves as a judge in Queens County Supreme Court, Civil Term, has received backing from the county party, while Li, who currently sits as a jurist in Manhattan Civil Court, is running as an insurgent.
With Furey now officially off the ballot, the surrogate judge race becomes simplified – it’s the county party against a well-funded challenger.
Hank Sheinkopf, a political strategist, said that Furey’s forced exit from the race likely will give a boost to Johnson.
“It gives an advantage to the organization candidate,” Sheinkopf said.
Johnson’s campaign, which challenged Furey’s petitions in court, did not respond to a request for comment on Monday.
A representative for the Queens County Democratic Party also did not respond to the Eagle’s request for comment.
In a statement, Li criticized the Queens County Democratic Party-backed candidate for fighting to get Furey off the ballot – though, challenging an opponent’s ballot petitions is a common practice.
"In a democratic society everyone has the right to run for public office,” Li said. “The people win when they have a choice at the polls, not when candidates are prevented from presenting their cases.”
Surrogate Court in New York City is often referred to as one of the last vestigates of “political patronage” in the city.
The court primarily deals with guardianships, estates and wills, which means that large amounts of money are often up for question in the court.
“It’s a big deal,” Sheinkopf said.
The seat is currently held by Judge Peter Kelly. The judge was elected as a Supreme Court justice last year but has been appointed to serve as acting surrogate judge, serving out the final year of his 14-year term on the Surrogate Court bench.
Kelly will serve until the end of the year, when either Li or Johnson take to the bench.
The Queens County Democratic Party is hoping it’s Johnson that heads to the court on Sutphin Boulevard.
Johnson’s rise through the ranks of Queens’ judiciary has been swift.
Supported by the Queens County Democratic Party, she was first elected to Civil Court in 2021.
In 2023, she was again selected by the Queens County Democratic Party to run on the party’s line for one of several Supreme Court vacancies in the borough. She won her election, becoming the first Haitian American woman to be elected to a State Supreme Court.
A Queens native, Johnson attended St. John’s University in Queens for both her undergraduate and law degrees. After graduating, she began working as an attorney with a private firm in Brooklyn for a year before she entered the city’s Human Resources Administration as a staff attorney.
She spent the intervening years as a law secretary, law clerk and briefly as a senior court attorney for the Law Department. She first was admitted to practice law in New York in 2007 after graduating from St. John’s University School of Law.
Johnson also currently serves as the corresponding secretary for both the Queens County Women's Bar Association and the Macon B. Allen Black Bar Association.
Her opponent and former judicial colleague, Li, was first elected as a judge in 2018, winning a race for Manhattan’s Civil Court.
Since then, she’s sat in Kings County Criminal Court, Queens Civil Court and Manhattan Civil Court.
Li, who grew up in China, spent a bulk of her career working as a private attorney. Li also served as a board director and secretary of the Asian American Judges Association of New York from 2020 to 2023.
Thus far, Li has vastly outraised Johnson, bringing in over $275,000 in campaign contributions. Johnson has raised around $51,800, as per the latest filings with the New York State Campaign Finance Board, which were made in January. The next filing deadline isn’t until the end of May.
Despite heavy restrictions on how judicial candidates can bring in money – they can’t raise money themselves and they are extremely limited in how they can pitch themselves to voters – Li has done well, though a number of large donations she’s received have come from outside of Queens.
She brought in a $5,000 donation from a donor in Manhattan, and another from a donor in Staten Island. She’s also brought in large sums from donors located in Long Island, Connecticut and New Jersey.
During a recent interview unrelated to this story, Li chalked up the donations coming from those outside of Queens to the universality of the Surrogate Court race.
“This is a local race in Queens,” Li told the Eagle. “However, I think that the importance is greater than that. Machine politics exists everywhere.”
Despite Li’s financial haul, Sheinkopf said that the now two-person raise is Johnson’s – and the Queens County Democratic Party’s – to lose.
“It’s hard to imagine how the organization loses,” Sheinkopf said. “It would be a very politically damaging loss.”
