H. Lee Sarokin, federal judge who freed Hurricane Carter, dies at 94

H. Lee Sarokin, who, as a New Jersey federal judge, overturned the triple murder conviction of star boxer Rubin (Hurricane) Carter, overturned a public library’s injunction against a homeless person, and angered cigarette companies who claimed he had biases against them , died Tuesday in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego, where he and his wife retired. He turned 94.

His death was reported by The Associated Press.

Judge Sarokin (pronounced SAR-eh-kin) resigned in 1996 while serving on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia, where he had served just under two years.

He had received much attention long before, during his 15 years as a judge of the United States District Court in Newark, where he was perhaps best known for his decision in the Carter case.

That case began when three white men were shot to death in a Paterson, NJ, inn in 1966. Mr. Carter and an acquaintance, John Artis, both black, were convicted of the murders by an all-white jury. Mr. Carter was sentenced to 30 years to life in prison, and Mr. Artis to 15 years to life.

The prosecution had offered no motive and several people had placed the defendants elsewhere at the time of the murders. But they were convicted, largely on the testimony of two men with long criminal records, one of whom said he saw Mr. Carter and Mr. Artis leave the inn with guns in their hands.

In 1976, the Supreme Court overturned the convictions after those witnesses recanted their testimony and evidence of prosecution misconduct came to light. In a retrial, the prosecution claimed the murders had been revenge for the murder of a black innkeeper, and the witness who originally placed an armed Mr. Carter at the scene recanted. Mr. Carter and Mr. Artis were found guilty again.

When the state court appeals failed, defense attorneys took the case to federal court in Newark, arguing before Judge Sarokin in 1985 that the convictions should be overturned because of constitutional violations. The judge agreed, ruling that the prosecutors had based their case on “an appeal to racism rather than reason, concealment rather than disclosure.”

Judge Sarokin said the prosecution had “deadly infected the trial” by invoking the racial revenge theory without sufficient evidence to support it, and that it had falsely withheld information that could have helped the defense. Mr. Carter was released after nearly two decades in prison. (Mr Artis had already been paroled.)

Shortly before he died in 2014, Mr. Carter in The New York Daily News that he was “brought free from a living hell by brave judge H. Lee Sarokin.”

After Mr. Carter’s death, long-retired Judge Sarokin revealed that Mr. Carter had called him every year, on the anniversary of his verdict, to talk. “His calls touched me deeply,” he told The San Diego Union-Tribune.

In “The Hurricane,” a 1999 movie starring Denzel Washington as Mr. Carter, the role of Judge Sarokin was played by Rod Steiger.

In another high-profile case, Judge Sarokin ruled in 1991 that a homeless person should not be barred from the library in Morristown, NJ because of his smell. He said that while public libraries could enforce rules for their patrons, the rules used by the Morristown library violated men’s rights because they were too broad.

“The policy does not contain or refer to identifiable standards” of hygiene that are a nuisance to others, he said, and “gives excessive discretion to library staff and police in enforcing them.”

He added, “If we want to protect our eyes and noses from homeless people, we need to revoke their condition, not their library card.”

Librarians whose buildings were increasingly being used as places of refuge by the homeless expressed concern over the ruling. An appeals court overturned it, saying the ordinance was valid because “it would be impossible to list all the various factual predicates” of a hygiene nuisance.

Although he was jovial in the courtroom, Judge Sarokin could write sternly critical decisions. In the tobacco cases, in which companies have been the target of lawsuits accusing them of covering up the dangers of smoking, the companies demanded that he be removed because the language in some of his statements showed bias towards the plaintiff.

In 1992, the tobacco companies managed to get him kicked out of one case after he initiated a ruling by stating bluntly that among those “who believe that consumer illness and death is an appropriate cost to their own welfare,” the tobacco industry “might the king of concealment and disinformation.”

An appeals court ruled that Judge Sarokin had to resign for violating “appearance of impartiality” standards, as whether the companies had concealed the harms of smoking had to be decided by a jury.

Two years later, when Judge Sarokin was nominated to serve on the same appeals court, he acknowledged at a Senate hearing that his language in that ruling may have been “excessively strong.” He added, “I accept that I have been irrepressible at times.”

Long after he retired, he returned to the subject as electronic cigarette companies challenged Food and Drug Administration scrutiny. “Not much has changed,” he wrote in a 2016 letter to The New York Times.

“I presided over the first tobacco trial for about 10 years,” he continued. “During my Senate hearing for nomination to the Court of Appeals, I reluctantly admitted that my language might not be suitable for a judicial opinion. I now want to withdraw that concession and declare that it was not loud enough.”

Haddon Lee Sarokin was born in Perth Amboy, NJ, on November 25, 1928, to Samuel and Reebe Sarokin. His father published small local newspapers and a state industrial directory, and his mother worked for the newspapers.

He graduated from Dartmouth College and, in 1953, from Harvard Law School. He was an attorney for Union County, NJ, in the 1960s, but was primarily in private practice until, appointed by President Jimmy Carter, he entered federal court in Newark in 1979.

His 1994 nomination to the Court of Appeals, by President Bill Clinton, struggled in the Senate, with Republicans accusing him of being an irresponsible, soft-on-crime liberal, but it was eventually approved. That criticism resurfaced in 1996, when Judge Sarokin was one of several justices who became campaigning for Republicans as Clinton ran for a second term.

He announced in June that he was resigning from the bank. “I see my life’s work and reputation being discredited almost daily,” he said at the time, “and I find I can’t ignore it.”

He denied speculation from judicial colleagues that his decision was also related to their rejection of what a court administrator called his “extremely unusual” request to move to California, where his children and grandchildren lived, and to commute to court in Philadelphia. as needed.

Judge Sarokin settled in the San Diego area and became a private mediator and arbitrator, writing commentary on legal and political issues for his own blog and later for HuffPost. He also wrote several plays, staged by a local repertory theatre. addressing issues of social justice and civil rights.

The Associated Press reported that Judge Sarokin is survived by his wife, Margie Sarokin, as well as five children and eleven grandchildren.

In an interview from 1989 on the public television program “The Open Mind,” Judge Sarokin told the host, Richard D. Heffner, that when a judge was called an activist, as conservative critics often called him, “it means someone disagrees” with a decision . “If they agree,” he added, “you’re in favor of the constitution.”