Re-posted by Nicholas Stix
New York hasn’t executed anyone since Eddie Mays in 1963. Since at least 1977, a series of liberal chief judges and governors have either used pretexts to thwart duly passed death penalty statutes, or have vetoed death penalty bills passed by the New York State Legislature and Senate.
In 1994, “conservative” Republican George Pataki ran on a platform that included bringing back the death penalty. In 1995, Pataki signed a death penalty bill into law, and yet justice was never meted out to any killers. Finally, in 2004, Judge Judith Kaye, the “liberal” Chief Judge of the State Court of Appeals, declared the statute “unconstitutional.”
How was it “unconstitutional”? It wasn’t. Judith Kaye’s personal prejudices forbade meting out justice to murderers; ergo, any death penalty statute was “unconstitutional.” She should have been impeached.
What was almost as bad as Kaye’s violation of her oath as judge, was the New York Post’s response. A house editorial said that the law was of course “unconstitutional.” The Post hadn’t previously expressed doubts about the death penalty law, and it didn’t explain how it was suddenly obviously “unconstitutional.” It was just jumping on the leftwing bandwagon, though for what reason, I cannot say.
The article below, from the New York Law Journal, is more an advertisement than a work of journalism, like a Wikipedia article for a racial socialist, which I guess Judith Kaye was. The thing has 15 photographs; I included the captions, but have no intention of downloading and uploading all those stupid photos.
[Earlier today, NYLJ sicced the KK—the Kopyright Kops—on me. I’m sure it was political retaliation. You never see lefties pull that on their political allies. I’d copied and pasted the Judith Kaye hagiography, but have now had to gut it, and so I also removed the link to the original. The article was no loss, but it did cost me precious time.]
The service was full of political machers, including Kaye’s second banana and successor, newly retired (December 31) Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman; Lippman’s successor, Westchester County DA Janet DiFiore; NYS judges Randall Eng, Sherri Klein Heitler, and Lawrence Marks, and former state judge A. Gail Prudenti; New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg; Former Court of Appeals Judge Carmen Beauchamp Ciparick; federal judges Dennis Jacobs, William Kuntz, and Stanley Stein; crooked New York State governor Eliot Spitzer, who was forced from office in disgrace; NYS Attorney General Eric Schneiderman; NYC Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, and his two-tine immediate predecessor, Ray Kelly. (That Bill Bratton and Ray Kelly, who despise each other, both showed up, is a tribute to how powerful Judith Kaye was.)
Kaye Honored as Trailblazer, Innovator, Friend
By Andrew Denney
January 11, 2016
New York Law Journal
Of the many titles held by Judith Kaye over her long career, one of her favorites came in a letter from a prisoner who began with the salutation, "Dear Mother of Justice."
"She loved that invented honorific," Rabbi Dr. Meir Soloveichik of the Congregation Shearith Israel, told the roughly 1,500 mourners who gathered at Lincoln Center Monday to pay their respects to Kaye and honor both her trailblazing legal career and her indefatigable spirit.
Kaye, the first female chief judge who served for a record-setting 15 years before retiring in 2008, died from cancer on Jan. 7. She was 77.
At the service, Kaye's casket, draped with an American flag, was placed center stage at the David H. Koch Theater. She was honored with a presentation of colors by the court system's ceremonial unit and a musical salute by its pipes and drums team.
Her son, Gordon Kaye, asked attendees to give his mother, an opera buff, a standing ovation as a fitting way to recognize her presence on stage. Her family also sported red shoes to the service, a nod to her penchant for wearing high-heeled red shoes….
Kaye's daughter, Luisa Kaye Hagemeier, said red "was and always will be" her mother's color and, given the fact that she defied expectations placed upon her and chose a career in law, "very fitting."
"Far from her rather staid image, she was actually a rebel," Hagemeier said….
[The rest of the paragraph consists of a feminist fairy tale about how in becoming a lawyer, Kaye “defied expectations.” She was a well-to-do privileged, young woman. She could do anything she pleased. I’m sure her family expected her to do something like what she did.]
Bloomberg said he "never would have become mayor" without Kaye—she administered the oath of office at the first and second of his three terms, in 2002 and 2006….
[Either this is an idiotic statement—if Kaye had not administered Bloomberg’s oath of office, someone else would have—or there’s a whole juicy backstory that “reporter” Andrew Denney is not telling us.]
Bloomberg also said Kaye's push to eliminate occupational exemptions for jury service meant that even "mayors and CEOs" would serve on juries. He noted that he himself was called for jury servic [sic] in Manhattan last week….
Kaye was born Judith Ann Smith in 1938, in Sullivan County. As a student at Barnard College in the 1950s, she had planned to be a journalist, and worked as a reporter at the Hudson Dispatch in Union City, New Jersey.
But while attending the New York University School of Law, Kaye became drawn to a legal career. She graduated law school in 1962 and joined Sullivan & Cromwell, where she met her husband, Stephen Rackow Kaye. The two married in 1964.
[What a stupid paragraph! I saw this sort of incompetent writing elsewhere recently. Cause-and-effect? Kaye had to have been drawn to a legal career before attending NYU’s law school. Otherwise, why would she have even applied to it?!
And that makes the previous paragraph stupid, as well. If she had planned to be a journalist, something changed her mind, whereupon she applied to NYU Law. What was it? We won’t find out from Andrew Denney.]
Stephen Kaye, who became a partner at [leftwing] Proskauer Rose, died in 2006.
Later, Kaye joined Olwine, Connelly, Chase, O'Donnell & Weyher in 1969, first as a part-time associate. Kaye became the firm's first female partner in 1975. In 1983, then-Gov. Mario Cuomo appointed her to the Court of Appeals. Ten years later, he appointed her chief judge.
[There’s another paragraph that flies right by another delicious backstory. To whom did Kaye owe her meteoric rise? No one rises so high, so fast, in the world of non-elected politics based on merit.]
At the time of her death, Kaye was of counsel to Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom….
Andrew Denney can be reached via
email or on Twitter @messagetime.
Judges aren't supposed to do justice. They are supposed to do law.
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