Last week, at age 98, Judge Weinstein announced his
retirement, saying he no longer had the stamina to perform his daily duties. In
an interview with The New York Times, he looked back over a tenure so packed
with accolades that his résumé now runs to more than 70 pages. He said his
unremitting hope and faith in the judicial system remained intact even in the
current polarized political climate.
“I’m convinced our country is bound to equalize,
democratize and to save with love, not hate,” he said.
Born in Kansas in 1921, Judge Weinstein earned his law
degree in 1948 from Columbia University after playing bit parts on Broadway and
serving as a submarine officer in the Pacific theater during World War II.
In his early years as a lawyer, he helped write legal
briefs in the landmark civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education. After he
was named to the bench in 1967 by President Lyndon B. Johnson, he presided over
groundbreaking mass tort cases involving the use of asbestos and the Vietnam-era
defoliant Agent Orange.
At the height of his career, Judge Weinstein, who is
known for his impressive eyebrows and his iconoclastic temperament, handled
several high-profile Mafia cases, including the prosecution of Vincent Gigante,
known as the Chin, the former boss of the Genovese crime family. A stickler for
propriety, Judge Weinstein once ordered the mob don, famous for dressing in his
bathrobe, to shower and spruce up when he came to court.
In the past decade, Judge Weinstein turned his
attention even further toward legal changes, publicly calling for
more female lawyers to have speaking roles in court and decrying the
“lack of sentencing alternatives” for violent young criminals who, he said, are
often written off as “society’s
unredeemables.” He has also tackled the endemic problem of police
officers lying on the witness stand.
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