Long Island judge Karen Wilutis hears Suffolk's most harrowing cases, from child rape to sex trafficking

The courtroom has no windows. On the fourth floor of the Suffolk County courthouse in Riverhead, time moves under fluorescent light and the intermittent sound of the courtroom door opening and then slamming shut. Behind the bench, worn brass letters spelling "In God We Trust" are affixed to the wall.

In front of it, some of the most disturbing stories on Long Island are told out loud.

On a recent morning, a prosecutor described the alleged sexual assault of a 6-year-old girl. Last month, a Wyandanch father stood trial here, accused of repeatedly raping his preteen daughter. She testified against him. Several of the defendants charged in the sex trafficking of a 14-year-old Patchogue girl — allegedly abducted, passed among adults, missing for 25 days — have also stood before this bench.

The judge listening to every word is Karen M. Wilutis.

As the acting Supreme Court justice assigned to Suffolk’s felony sex offense court, Wilutis presides over the county’s most harrowing prosecutions — child rape, sex trafficking, digital exploitation — cases most judges are loath to hear and few citizens will ever witness. Her rulings determine who goes to prison, for how long and under what terms offenders will one day return to society.

It is a job that calls for an even temperament and an affinity for power — to do good, to try to lessen the trauma, to enact a modicum of justice.

"It's very difficult to hear a child on the witness stand relay the allegations against whomever — it's usually a family member or a close friend of the family," Wilutis said when asked how she copes with the emotional strain of the job. "It's very upsetting. ... I try to not bring it home with me. I don't talk about it at home. It's too upsetting."

Long judicial, political career

Wilutis came to the bench more than a decade ago, following a career that included stints in the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office, as Brookhaven town attorney and a criminal defense attorney. She was long involved in Republican politics in Suffolk.

Her chamber — judicial parlance for a judge’s office — is a contrast to the cruelties of the world that are described in her courtroom. A tabletop Christmas tree sits right outside Wilutis’ office, which is decidedly decked out for the holiday in bright red velvet bows. Light pours into the space through the bank of windows behind her desk. A wall of framed photographs features conservative icons like Ronald Reagan and Winston Churchill.

One of the toughest parts of her job, Wilutis said, is selecting a jury in cases that go to trial.

"Once I read the indictment of the charges, most people don't want to stay," Wilutis said. "So they all head out of the door. And I'm not gonna keep anyone against their will. Obviously, if they're upset, I excuse them."

She's also had very emotionally charged moments with potential jurors.

"During jury selection, several times, I've had [prospective jurors] that ask to speak in private. ... And they will say, for the first time, and they'll start crying, 'I was the victim of sex abuse and I've never told anyone.' Like I'm the first person they've told. And they're 40 to 50 years old, men and women. That was shocking to me."

Wilutis, 67, was elected a Suffolk County district court judge in 2013, serving a six-year term. During her time on the bench, she presided over courts specializing in DWI and domestic violence. In 2019, she took over the sex crimes court, but was later defeated in her reelection bid.

She then worked in Suffolk’s Family Court as a county attorney referee, which oversees issues such as custody, visitation and orders of protection. She was again elected a district court judge in 2021 and was assigned by court administration to the Sex Offense Court in 2022. 

Wilutis is seated on the bench promptly at 9:30 every morning. The docket includes about 130 pending indictments, and she has another 200 probation compliance cases she oversees.

"It's extremely busy," Wilutis said. Sex trafficking and child pornography allegations involving unlawful surveillance make up a large bulk of her work.

A Suffolk native raised by her father, a schoolteacher, and her mother, a school principal, Wilutis, then known as Karen Eide, graduated from Vassar College in 1980 and three years later received her law degree from the Emory University School of Law.

In 1984, she went to work for then-Suffolk County District Attorney Patrick Henry, a Republican, handling cases in the District Court, Grand Jury, Screening and Major Crime bureaus until 1988.

Retired Judge William Condon, who presided over the trial of Michael Valva in the death of his son  before his 2022 retirement from the judiciary, remembered Wilutis as a "conscientious" young lawyer when they both were prosecutors in the district attorney's office in the 1980s.

"You have a lot of judges on the bench right now that probably don’t belong there," Condon said. "She’s certainly not one of them. She shows up every day and does a good job."

She married criminal defense attorney Steven Wilutis, who also began his career in the district attorney's office, and they later ran a law firm together.  Karen Wilutis practiced matrimonial, family and criminal law work. The couple have two adult children.

In an interview, Steven Wilutis  said although his wife long dreamed of becoming a judge and wanted to handle felony cases in Riverhead, she didn’t seek the role overseeing sex crimes.

"She always wanted to be a judge," said Steven Wilutis, who’s in private practice in Miller Place. "She thought she’d be a good judge, she’d be a fair judge. That was the path that was given to her and she willingly accepted it."

Karen Wilutis was involved in Brookhaven political circles before becoming a judge, landing a series of politically connected jobs. She was vice chairwoman of the Brookhaven planning board, counsel to the Town of Brookhaven ethics board and twice served as Brookhaven town attorney — from 2002 to 2005 and from 2008 to 2010. She then shifted to work as the legislative director for Republican New York State Sen. John J. Flanagan.

Democrat Sarah Anker bested her for a seat on the Suffolk County Legislature in 2011.

"It's all about jobs and taxes," she told Newsday that year as she sought the 6th District seat.

She left her job with Flanagan in 2013, the same year she got on the judicial ballot and won.

'The hardest cases to defend'

Wilutis does not speak in abstractions about justice. She speaks about consequences.

"This is not diversion court," she said flatly. "This is monitoring people who are convicted of sex offenses. And managing them."

Her courtroom is not designed for second chances in the way drug courts or mental health courts are. Most of the defendants who pass through her part face the most serious felony classifications in New York law — violent B felonies that carry exposure of up to 25 years in state prison, followed by decades of post-release supervision.

Probation, she tells them repeatedly, is not leniency. It is conditional freedom.

"Being on probation is a privilege, not a right," she said. "If they can’t abide by it, they get resentenced."

Being on probation is a privilege, not a right.

—Justice Karen M. Wilutis

Under those conditions, offenders are forbidden from contact with children, barred from living near schools or day care centers and are required to submit to intensive counseling, supervision and monitoring. Some are sent to prison. Others remain under the watch of the state for the rest of their adult lives.

"Everyone hopes they can be rehabilitated," Wilutis said. "But this is behavioral management. They have to understand why they have those desires."

Asked whether she considers herself a tough-on-crime judge, Wilutis paused only briefly.

"I follow the law," she said. "Yeah."

In practice, that often means long sentences. When juries convict at trial, she sentences on what she openly describes as the "higher side."

She has already heard the testimony. She has watched the victims take the stand. She reads every pre-sentence report.

"These are extremely serious crimes," she said. "I feel they deserve that."

For defense attorneys, that reputation is well established.

"She’s pleasant, but she’s tough," said Hamptons Bays attorney Ian Fitzgerald, who once watched Wilutis sentence his client — a man convicted of sexually abusing three of his own children — to more than three decades in prison. "After trial, she does tend to give sentences on the higher range. I wasn’t happy. But I’ve always found her to be fair.

"These are the hardest cases to defend," he said. "There are victims claiming unimaginable harm. And yet she allows us to fully do our job. She listens. She considers everything. She doesn’t always rule the way you want — but you always feel heard."

Steve Politi, a Central Islip defense attorney, echoed that assessment.

"These are difficult cases to defend because more often than not, there are individuals claiming to be victims of serious sexual offenses and they're highly sensitive cases," Politi said. "Judge Wilutis does a very good job of trying to get to a fair resolution and an appropriate sentence for each defendant. Perhaps most importantly, to me, she allows the defense attorneys to do their job. With regard to my cases, she's thoughtful, she allows me to do what I need to do to defend my clients, and considers all the things I tell her about my cases and my clients."

On the bench, Wilutis can be gentle and unyielding in the same afternoon.

To a probationer who had just lost his job at Target, she offered encouragement: "I want to see you succeed. Everyone’s trying to help you."

Minutes later, addressing a man who violated his conditions, her voice hardened. "I suggest you take this seriously," she warned. "Being on probation is a privilege, not a right. The alternative is going to jail."

In the oscillation between belief in rehabilitation and certainty in punishment lies the narrow corridor she walks every day.

Blowing bubbles into the air

Days earlier, a different man had stood in the same spot, facing a 7-year prison sentence. After apologizing to his family, he turned toward the gallery and, through an interpreter, asked his partner to marry him.

"My love, will you marry me?" the defendant, clad in prison greens, inquired in Spanish.

For a moment, the machinery of punishment stalled under the intrusion of human want.

Wilutis stopped him immediately.

The work does not pause for romance.

At the defense table, attorneys still argue. Prosecutors still rise with binders of evidence and digital timelines. Behind closed doors, Wilutis still reads the presentence reports, listens to victim impact statements, calculates years and decades and conditions that will govern the rest of a person’s life.

But at times, there are moments of celebration.

An older defendant, in a suit and using a cane, was met with applause from the judge and her staff.

"Congratulations!" Wilutis told him. "You completed your probation. I’m very pleased. I don’t ever want to see you again."

Her predecessor, Judge Barbara Kahn, a mentor, had once explained how she survived the weight of it all. After a verdict in a brutal child abuse case, Kahn had invited a colleague into her chambers, closed the door, pulled a small jar of bubbles from her desk and began to blow them into the air.

"When the last bubble pops," she said, "the case is over. I move on."

Kahn died not long after her retirement. Her photograph now hangs beside Wilutis’ bench.

In Wilutis’ courtroom, the cases do not disappear. They accumulate. They line the docket. They return in probation violations and re-sentencings and post-release supervision. They arrive in new forms — hidden cameras, online exploitation, missing girls found too late.

Wilutis says she does not take the work home with her. But the work follows her all the same — in the limits of what she will ever again find shocking, in the fluency with which she now speaks about crimes most people cannot name without flinching, in the long corridor of years she assigns without hesitation.

Every sentence she delivers closes one life and reopens another.

And each morning, beneath the brass promise on the wall, she takes her seat again — listening as Long Island tells her what it has done to its children and its victims of sexual abuse.