When Richard Snyder was running to be a town justice in tiny Petersburgh, N.Y., in 2013, he told a local news site that he would be fair and honest on the bench. Because he was not a lawyer, he also said he was “looking forward to learning about the law.”

He just learned something about it the hard way.

Mr. Snyder, a Republican, was unopposed in that 2013 race and won it with 329 votes. But in December he resigned after a disciplinary panel found that he had tried to get out of grand jury duty by introducing himself as a town justice and saying he could not be impartial.

“I know they are guilty,” Mr. Snyder said in arguing to be excused, according to a court transcript. Otherwise, he explained, “they would not be in front of me.” (The judge dismissed him and notified the disciplinary panel.)

The remarks, which were made in October 2023 and led to a formal complaint, were a window into the world of New York’s hundreds of village and town courts, where traffic tickets and petty crimes are adjudicated by people who are not always steeped in legal basics.

“There is no place on the bench for someone who so deeply misunderstands the role of a judge and the administration of justice,” Robert Tembeckjian, the administrator of the disciplinary panel, the State Commission on Judicial Conduct, said in a statement.