Word: weinfeld
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Last week Federal Judge Edward Weinfeld of New York's Southern District answered firmly that judges have no business getting mixed up in such deals. A 65-year-old jurist with a reputation for working long hours and never ducking the tough cases, Weinfeld insisted that the bargain deprives a defendant of his rights without due process, impairs a judge's objectivity, makes a sham of the guilty plea and "has no place in a system of justice...
Fundamental Fairness. Weinfeld was ruling on the habeas corpus petition of a Latvian named Almars Elksnis who killed his wife with a kitchen knife during a marital fray at their North Tarrytown, N.Y., home one hot night in June 1955. Because he had been in jail once before for another stabbing, Elksnis was a twotime loser headed for a heavy sentence. So when he came before Westchester County Judge George A. Brenner prepared to stand trial on a second-degree murder charge, he could not but accept Brenner's offer: "If you will plead guilty to first-degree manslaughter...
Brenner denied Elksnis due process when he did not tell him that he could change his plea, said Judge Weinfeld; more important for other cases, even if Brenner had kept his word, the whole pact violated rules of "fundamental fairness." Such bargains, said Weinfeld, are inherently wrong because of "the unequal positions of the judge and the accused, one with the power to commit to prison and the other deeply concerned to avoid prison." A guilty plea "predicated upon a judge's promise of a definite sentence," he added, "by its very nature does not qualify as a free...
Propriety & Practice. It may well be, Weinfeld concluded, that "voluntary, as distinguished from coercive, bargaining between the prosecutor and the defendant has been sanctioned by propriety and practice." But he drew a sharp distinction between such deals and "plea-bargaining between the judge and the accused...
...Weinfeld's approval of Elksnis' writ of habeas corpus left the state with a choice between appealing Weinfeld's ruling to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and retrying Elksnis on the murder charge. What is not known is whether the ruling will bring a flood of appeals from convicts who struck similar bargains and now figure they will beat the rap because time has eroded the evidence...