Here in Duane, a speck of a town in the center of the county, Justice Gori is in many ways a typical small-town New York justice.

A bricklayer and a former dog trainer with a high school education, he is an approachable man of 59, in jeans hitched up with suspenders. On Thursday nights he ambles down to the volunteer firehouse to hold court, such as it is. His grasp of the law is somewhat shaky. His temper sometimes gets the better of him.

He has no judge’s bench, few law books and no court clerk. He is something of an accidental judge, occupying the position for nearly a decade largely because no one else wants it, people here say. Although state officials have reprimanded him twice for fundamental lapses in the conduct of his job, few Duane voters seemed to know or care. “Nobody’s ever asked a question about it,” Justice Gori said.

He seems well-intentioned enough. Like many justices, he describes his job as public service, and he says he studies the law for several hours every week.

But there is evidence that that may not be enough. When the judicial conduct commission called Justice Gori to account for his handling of Mr. Betters’s case, his defense was startling, a transcript of the hearing shows. His own lawyer blamed the state for running the justice courts as it does: Judges, he said, with so little training — six days of classes, and a 12-hour refresher course once a year — could not possibly know the basic rules for handling a lawsuit.

The county’s district attorney, Derek P. Champagne, says that when he took office five years ago, he had to drop hundreds of criminal cases because justices had failed to take any action for so long. Mr. Champagne says his staff of four full-time prosecutors is too small even to regularly visit the justice courts, which are separated by great distances.

Franklin County is bigger than Rhode Island. But it has only one higher court judge, in the county court in Malone. So the part-time town and village justices — plumbers, meat cutters and school bus drivers — are often the last word on the law here, with the power to issue search warrants, conduct trials, put some people in jail and let friends go free.