IT’S ABOUT TIME

Robert Morgenthau. is finally giving up his job as Manhattan District Attorney and it has cast a pall over the whole city, if you believe the indigenous media. It’s end-of-an-era time at the Times and CBS and the rest of the mainstreamers, with a touch of we-shall-not-look-upon-his-like-again thrown in. Can we count on that? is my reaction.

For justification of my refusal to join in the chorus of regret over the loss of the great man, I point to a Times article of 1997, twenty-two years after he took over as D.A. It reported that he had refused the requests of New York Governor Pataki and New York City Mayor Giuliani that he seek the death penalty in the case of N.Y. police officer Sanchez, who had been shot to death by a burglar he’d intercepted fleeing from an attempted murder of his own father. The governor and mayor had previously removed a similar case from the jurisdiction of the Bronx County district attorney on the grounds that his refusal was based on nothing but personal prejudice, in violation of the death penalty statute.

Morgenthau got away with his usual story, already invoked in six other cases, that his refusal was based solely on the merits of the case as studied by a committee of his prosecutors, who somehow always seemed to agree with their boss in these matters. The cop’s parents, a Hispanic couple, got notified of the decision by one of Morgenthau’s aides, not by him. The mayor and the governor accepted the bad news with regret, but took no further action.

Morgenthau had always lived a privileged life as might be expected of the grandson of a Wall Street millionaire, our World War I ambassador to the Ottoman Empire (Turkey), and son of Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury. As such, Robert was used to having his pronouncements accepted without reserve by the faceless masses whom he honored with his imperial presence. The Sanchezes violated this rule by questioning his decision against their son and were never heard from again.

They had plenty of company in their neglected state as literally thousands of other New Yorkers were deprived of their right of reprisal against murderers by Morgenthau’s refusal to enforce the death penalty against a single murderer during his whole thirty-four years in office. Nobody believed his repeated claim that he just never got a case that fitted the requirements of the law because he was on record repeatedly denouncing the death penalty and promising he’d never enforce it under any circumstances.

Granted that the state legislature had only agreed to restore the penalty if it was surrounded with an obstacle course of restrictions and qualifications calculated to discourage its use, still how possible was it that in a total of about 50,000 murders in New York during Morgenthau’s incumbency, of which at least one-fifth or 10,000 happened in his jurisdiction, no cases worthy of maximum prosecution could be found? Yes, many of them were cases between criminals, but there were still thousands involving innocent citizens who had thought the law was to be obeyed and by which they were now betrayed

What about the fact that the other four New York City District Attorneys also failed to demand the death penalty in their cases? Obviously they were taking shelter behind Morgenthau. If he could get away with ducking his responsibilities why shouldn’t they? If the best-known D. A. in America, whose office was featured on “Law and Order”, didn’t choose to do his duty, it wasn’t up to them to fill in the gaps left by him. Why should they have to take on the wealthy idealists at the New York Times, who had no fear of crime in their own neighborhoods and no sympathy with people who did fear it and supported barbaric punishments like execution? And wasn’t the Court of Appeals loaded with similar fat cats who had the same attitude?

So much for the will of the people. It had been exerted in 1994 to eject Mario Cuomo from the Governorship after three terms because he had continually frustrated all efforts to reinstate the death penalty. He had gone the limit with his speeches against it, even maintaining that life in prison was a worse punishment, which no convict would choose if death was the alternative. Mario came close to telling the world that people actually liked to die and sending them to the electric chair was the same as realizing their life’s ambition. This was to much for the public to swallow and he was returned to private life.

Some of the cases Morgenthau copped out on were bad enough to bring his humanity into question. There was the Nicole DuFresne case in January 2005 where a young actress was shot down on the street by a 19-year-old mugger who objected to her asking if he was going to shoot her. Nobody dissed him like that. Morgenthau prevented him from getting the sentence he deserved.

Before that there were the three killings above the Carnegie Delicatessen in 2001 where a woman selling marijuana out of her apartment was mowed down with two customers by a pair of gunmen. Morgenthau mercy was again on tap and the murderers are comfortably lodged in jail instead of an unmarked grave.

If I write about this subject again I may go into the background of this distinguished public servant who clearly looks on the public as his servants subject to his unusual notions of law and legislation. A few years ago I wrote a little about Frank Hague, the 30’s mayor of Jersey City, who summed up his theory of government very neatly when he told a crowd “I am the law!” The reporters thought it was all a joke. They hadn’t met Robert Morgenthau.