Queens Daily Eagle

The race between Patrick Martinez and Shamsul Haque in District 30 is now down to two votes. Photos via campaigns By Ryan Schwach Only two votes separated a pair of Democrats running to represent a portion of western Queens in the Assembly this week after a vast majority of ballots had been counted by the Board of Elections in the week since Election Day.

By Noah Powelson A 1993 murder in Queens has become a gruesome case of déjà vu after a man found guilty of killing his estranged wife by two different juries three decades apart was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison on Wednesday, seven years after he completed his 26-year prison term for the same crime.

A boost in funding for the Rockaway trauma center was not included in the city’s budget that passed on Tuesday. John McCarten/NYC Council Media Unit By Ryan Schwach Capital funding for a new trauma center on the Rockaway peninsula was left out of the city’s $126 billion budget passed by the City Council Tuesday, despite growing calls from the community to finance the project in the isolated area in Queens.

By Jacob Kaye For the past year, Leon Jones has passed a group of police officers stationed near his home on Rockaway Boulevard in Queens nearly every time he’s gone outside. He’s never sure if they recognize him – but he recognizes them. “They act like they don’t even know who I am because I'm not wounded no more, my face is not knotted up, I don't have the bloody clothes on,” Jones recently told the Eagle.

By Noah Powelson Labor contracts for some of the city’s largest public defender organizations expired at midnight on Tuesday, raising the possibility for over 1,000 attorneys to walk off the job if a deal isn’t reached soon.

By Ryan Schwach The end of a prolonged legal battle between the mayor’s office and the City Council over an expensive housing voucher program known as CityFHEPS was baked into the city’s colossal $125 billion budget, which was passed by the Council late Tuesday.

By Ryan Schwach Queens’ courts celebrated Pride Month at Civil Court on Monday, recognizing the mark the LGBTQIA+ community has left on the state’s judicial system – but this month’s celebration comes at a tenuous point as the federal government threatens the freedom and safety of transgender Americans and the wider LGBTQIA+ community, officials said.

The North Infirmary Command was shut down and transferred out of Department of Correction jurisdiction on Monday. Eagle photo by Noah Powelson By Noah Powelson After former Mayor Eric Adams stalled on a key element of the plan to close Rikers Island, the Mamdani administration on Monday reversed course, transferring three jail facilities out of Department of Correction control and reviving a jail decommissioning process required by city law.

By Jacob Kaye New York’s courts have over the past year begun to move cases more quickly, reducing the amount of time defendants have to wait on Rikers Island for their cases’ to come to a conclusion – but a number of entrenched obstacles could make even quicker case processing difficult to achieve, the state’s top administrative judge warned last week.

The areas of 132nd Street and 126rd Street where street parking will be closed down during construction of Queens’ borough-based jail. Eagle file photo by Noah Powelson By Noah Powelson After a month-long delay, street parking around Queens Criminal Court is scheduled to officially close down Monday as construction of the future borough-based jail in the court’s backyard progresses.