Judge should be benched for suing eye doc employee who filed complaint against him, agency says
A New York agency recently found that Judge Frank M. Mora should be removed from the bench, after he filed a defamation action against an ophthalmology practice employee who complained about him creating “a huge scene” at her office.
The State of New York Commission on Judicial Conduct determination, released Aug. 21, found that Mora was wrong for refusing to leave the eye center when asked, and he retaliated against the person who filed the commission complaint. Mora was appointed to the Poughkeepsie City Court, in Dutchess County, in 2011.
“They got it wrong. Now we are going to go to the Court of Appeals, and we will finally have a totally independent body that will look at this case,” Stephen R. Coffey, who represents Mora, told the ABA Journal.
In December 2021 a Poughkeepsie ophthalmology practice office manager accused Mora of refusing to replace his plastic face shield with a mask and not leaving when asked, for approximately 30 minutes, according to the determination.
A day after the incident Stacey Koch, the office manager, filed a complaint against Mora with the commission. In December 2022 Koch sued her for defamation. The state court action alleged that she lied about him in her commission complaint.
The Dutchess County Supreme Court granted the defense’s motion to dismiss the defamation complaint, and awarded Koch attorney fees and costs. The parties later settled; the agreement included Mora agreeing to avoid future conduct with Koch and any of the office locations.
For the judicial conduct complaint, in October 2025 a referee designated by the commission found that Mora appeared to file the defamation action against Koch in retaliation. However he did not find there was enough evidence to establish Mora “engaged in a discourteous verbal confrontation” with Koch, or improperly withheld evidence from the commission during its investigation. Mora admitted that it was wrong to not leave the office when asked, and told the referee he did not do so because he was having a panic attack, the determination states.
According to the commission determination, the referee found that Mora’s anger “resulting from that complaint was palpable in the hearing room, and in the facts to which he testified.” Additionally, the determination states that Mora admitted to suing Koch because he wanted to “make her pay.”
Mora said he didn’t think the commission’s process would provide him with recourse, even if it dismissed Koch’s complaint as meritless, because it did not allow for monetary damages against her, according to the determination.
It also notes that a judge’s behavior, including when they are not on the bench, impacts public confidence in the courts. Additionally, the determination found that retaliating against someone who files a judicial complaint against you is serious misconduct, because it undermines the disciplinary process.
“Given the special role of judges in society, there are certain limitations on their conduct which are not applicable to non-judges,” the determination states.
Also, the commission found that Mora did not follow the advice of Michael H. Sussman, an attorney who represented him in the defamation action. According to the agency, Sussman told Mora it didn’t look good for a judge to sue someone who filed a commission complaint against them.
Sussman told the ABA Journal that is not true. Instead, according to Sussman, he advised Mora that when someone files a defamation claim about something said about them, it “spreads the news.”
“I say that with every defamation claim I file,” Sussman says. He doesn’t believe that the commission complaint was privileged, and notes that Koch did not have a case in front of Mora.
“I believe that as a citizen he had an absolute right to bring it. The notion that what he did is suffocating to her rights is without any basis,” Sussman says.
Lawyers at Davis Wright Tremaine represented Koch in the defamation suit.
“His meritless and retaliatory defamation lawsuit was dismissed because complaints reporting misconduct to the Commission are absolutely privileged from defamation claims,” Raphael Holoszyc-Pimentel, a Davis Wright Tremaine associate who represented Koch, told the ABA Journal in an email. “We were honored to represent Ms. Koch in that case pro bono and to defend the rights of New Yorkers to report government misconduct.”
Sussman also represents Mora in a federal action, which claims that the state unified court system violated the judge’s constitutional rights with an earlier COVID vaccine mandate for the bench and employees. The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York complaint, filed in December 2022, argued that the state agency failed to recognize the judge’s sincerely held religious beliefs, wrongfully denied him and exemption from the vaccine and prevented him from doing his job. In 2023 Reuters described Mora as a “devout Catholic.”
The state unified court system’s motion to dismiss was granted in 2023. The same year, the vaccine requirement was eliminated, Reuters reported. In April 2026 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed the district court judgement in a summary order.
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