[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----NY, FLA.

[Rick Halperin]

July 22




NEW YORK:

Robert Morgenthau, Longtime Manhattan District Attorney, Dies at 99



Robert M. Morgenthau, a courtly Knickerbocker patrician who waged war on crime 
for more than four decades as the chief federal prosecutor for Southern New 
York State and as Manhattan’s longest-serving district attorney, died on Sunday 
in Manhattan. He was 99.

Mr. Morgenthau’s wife, Lucinda Franks, said he died at Lenox Hill Hospital 
after a short illness.

In an era of notorious Wall Street chicanery and often dangerous streets, Mr. 
Morgenthau was the bane of mobsters, crooked politicians and corporate greed; a 
public avenger to killers, rapists and drug dealers; and a confidant of mayors 
and governors, who came and went while he stayed on — for nearly nine years in 
the 1960s as the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York 
and for 35 more as Gotham’s aristocratic Mr. District Attorney.

For a Morgenthau — the scion of a family steeped in wealth, privilege and 
public service — he was strangely awkward, a wooden speaker who seemed 
painfully shy on the stump. His grandfather had been an ambassador in President 
Woodrow Wilson’s day, and his father was President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 
treasury secretary. His own early political forays, 2 runs for governor of New 
York, ended disastrously.

But from Jan. 1, 1975, when he took over from an interim successor to the 
legendary district attorney Frank S. Hogan, to Dec. 31, 2009, when he finally 
gave up his office in the old Criminal Courts Building on the edge of 
Chinatown, Mr. Morgenthau was the face of justice in Manhattan, a liberal 
Democrat elected nine times in succession, usually by landslides and with the 
endorsement of virtually all the political parties.

He presided over a battalion of 500 lawyers, a $75 million budget and a torrent 
of cases every year that fixed the fates of accused stock manipulators, 
extortionists, murderers, muggers, wife-beaters and sexual predators, and in 
turn helped to shape the quality of life for millions in a city of vast riches 
and untold hardships.

While he rarely went to court himself, Mr. Morgenthau, by his own count, 
supervised a total of 3.5 million cases over the years. Many of them were 
run-of-the-mill drug busts, but there were also highly publicized trials, like 
those of the subway vigilante Bernard Goetz; the Central Park “preppy” killer, 
Robert Chambers; and John Lennon’s assassin, Mark David Chapman.

His victories included the 2005 conviction of L. Dennis Kozlowski, chief 
executive of Tyco International, whose $6,000 shower curtains and a $2 million 
birthday party for his wife on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia came to 
symbolize corporate greed. Found guilty of misappropriating more than $100 
million from his company, Mr. Kozlowski was sentenced to eight to 25 years, 
although he won parole in 2014.

In a bizarre case, Mr. Morgenthau may have been the only prosecutor in history 
to convict a mother and son for murder without a body or a witness. The 
defendants, Sante and Kenneth Kimes, were accused of a scheme in 1998 to assume 
the identity of their landlady, the 82-year-old socialite Irene Silverman, and 
take over her $7.7 million Manhattan mansion.

Her body was never found, but they were convicted of her murder and scores of 
other charges in 2000, partly on the basis of Sante Kimes’s notebooks detailing 
the plot and notes by the victim expressing fear of her lodgers. Sante Kimes 
denied everything, but Kenneth confessed later that his mother had used a stun 
gun on the victim and that he had then strangled her, stuffed the body in a bag 
and left it in a dumpster in Hoboken, N.J.

Mr. Morgenthau’s pursuit of crime sometimes took him beyond Manhattan. In 2004, 
he won a bribery-conspiracy case against State Senator Guy J. Velella, a 
Republican whose district lay entirely outside Manhattan, in the Bronx and 
Westchester County. Prosecutors using surveying equipment showed that one crime 
scene was within 500 yards of Manhattan, and argued successfully that it fell 
within their jurisdiction.

Federal prosecutors said Mr. Morgenthau also did not respect jurisdictional 
lines when he followed the money trails in white-collar crimes to Paraguay, 
Iran, the Cayman Islands and Belgium. Two weeks before he retired, Mr. 
Morgenthau reached a $536 million settlement with Credit Suisse, Switzerland’s 
second-largest bank, which had helped Iranian, Libyan and Sudanese clients hide 
shady business in America.

But Mr. Morgenthau spent years working with federal prosecutors investigating 
the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, a global enterprise founded by 
Middle Eastern investors as a nexus for money that flowed in and out of drug 
cartels, terrorist groups and dictatorships. In 1991, the bank pleaded guilty 
to federal and state charges in what Mr. Morgenthau called the largest bank 
fraud in financial history, with losses estimated at $15 billion. It was forced 
to close, pay fines and forfeit all its assets.

He also indicted Clark M. Clifford, an adviser to Democratic presidents, and 
his law partner Robert A. Altman on charges of taking $40 million in bribes for 
helping the bank gain control of a large bank holding company. Mr. Clifford’s 
failing health led to the dismissal of charges against him, and Mr. Altman was 
acquitted.

The Target of Protests

Although he cultivated an image of imperviousness to public pressure, Mr. 
Morgenthau was often barraged with criticism, particularly in cases involving 
racial bias or police brutality. Critics said he was slow to respond to an 
epidemic of police corruption in the 1980s, including cases in which transit 
officers falsely arrested 8 black men, who sued and collectively won $1 million 
in damages.

After the 1983 death in custody of Michael Stewart, a 25-year-old black 
graffiti artist arrested for spray-painting on a subway station wall, six white 
transit officers who had handcuffed him and were seen forcing a nightstick down 
on his neck were acquitted of criminal charges in 1985. The verdicts touched 
off protests by people who contended that Mr. Morgenthau had mishandled the 
prosecution.

And in a case that seemed to confirm national impressions of New York City as a 
cesspool of crime and race hatred, Mr. Morgenthau was vilified for what many 
called a waffling prosecution of Mr. Goetz, a white loner who shot 4 young 
black men on a subway train in 1984 after they surrounded him and demanded 
money. One victim was left paralyzed and partly brain-damaged.

“You don’t look so bad, here’s another,” the gunman told one prone victim as he 
fired again and fled.

Variously hailed as a hero who acted in self-defense and denounced as a racist 
self-appointed vigilante, Mr. Goetz was first indicted only for illegal 
possession of a gun. After a public outcry, another grand jury indicted him for 
attempted murder. But the more serious charges were dismissed on a 
technicality, and he was finally convicted in 1987 on a weapons charge and 
served 6 months in jail.

The disappearance of a 6-year-old boy, Etan Patz, from a Manhattan street in 
1979 — a case that generated a movement to raise public awareness, increase 
law-enforcement resources and pass new legislation to find missing children — 
riveted the city and the nation for decades, as theories and suspects came and 
went without sufficient evidence for a prosecution during Mr. Morgenthau’s 
tenure.

But the case was reopened by District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. in 2012, and 
Pedro Hernandez, a former bodega stock clerk who confessed to luring Etan into 
a basement and attacking him, was found guilty in 2017 of kidnapping and 
murdering the boy. Mr. Hernandez, 56, who had lived in New Jersey for years, 
was traced through a tip from his brother-in-law. He was sentenced to 25 years 
to life in prison.

Mr. Morgenthau lost about 1/4 of his cases, and some that he won proved to be 
miscarriages of justice. The most glaring example was the conviction of 5 young 
black and Latino men from Harlem, 4 of whom falsely confessed on videotape to 
the 1989 beating and rape of the 28-year-old investment banker who became known 
as the Central Park Jogger.

After serving terms of 7½ to 13 years, the 5 were exonerated in 2002 after an 
imprisoned serial rapist and murderer, Matias Reyes, confessed to the crime. 
Mr. Morgenthau ordered a new investigation, including DNA tests that confirmed 
the Reyes account, and moved to clear the men in court.

“If only we had DNA 13 years ago,” Mr. Morgenthau lamented.

“I think it was his finest hour,” said Barry Scheck, a founding director of the 
Innocence Project of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, which promotes the 
use of DNA to reverse wrongful convictions. “Very few D.A.s would have done 
that, but he could with his stature, self-confidence, guts and commitment to 
principle. In that and other cases I’ve seen, I believe he has asked, ‘Is this 
the right thing to do?’”

A Revered Institution

Mr. Morgenthau was probably the most innovative prosecutor in the city’s 
history. To pursue financial crimes, he hired scores of accountants and 
detectives with financial expertise. He promoted DNA testing and other modern 
investigating techniques. Enlarging the homicide bureau and other units, he 
hired Spanish-speaking interpreters and hundreds of black, Hispanic and female 
prosecutors, and he created the office’s first sex-crimes and consumer affairs 
units.

He stressed the prosecution of career criminals, drug pushers, child 
pornographers, landlords who harassed tenants and perpetrators of attacks on 
gay men and lesbians. And throughout his tenure he opposed the death penalty, 
arguing that it was inhumane and was ineffective as a deterrent.

In later years, many New Yorkers wondered if he was too old for the job. As he 
ran for a ninth term in 2005, he faced rigorous opposition in a Democratic 
primary for the 1st time in decades. The challenger, Leslie Crocker Snyder, a 
former state court judge, was endorsed by a number of longtime Morgenthau 
supporters. But Mr. Morgenthau won the primary, 59 to 41 percent, and the 
general election, with 99 percent of the vote. He had run unopposed in general 
elections for 20 years, and did so again in this, his last race.

In a grandfatherly cardigan, his lanky legs propped on a desk and his wispy 
white hair afloat, Mr. Morgenthau looked like an aging prep-school master, not 
America’s best-known D.A., a model for the prosecutor played by Steven Hill on 
the long-running TV drama “Law & Order.” Some took his occasionally mismatched 
socks for absent-mindedness and his guttural voice for gruffness. He was 
typically mild-mannered.

Despite his highbrow upbringing, his inflections were New York: “had to” came 
out “hadda.” He loved Dunhill Montecruz cigars, allowing himself two a day 
until he quit years ago. His health seemed good even in his later years. But 
decades of strain in one of the city’s most demanding jobs were apparent in the 
stooped shoulders and the gaunt face lined with legal decisions.

By 2009, when he decided not to run for another term, Mr. Morgenthau was a 
virtual institution, despised by the enemies a prosecutor inevitably acquires 
but widely admired by New Yorkers and revered by generations of assistants he 
had hired and mentored, many of whom had gone on to judgeships and careers in 
politics and the law — extensions of his influence who regarded him as an 
embodiment of integrity.

His former protégés included Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor of the United 
States Supreme Court; Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo; former Gov. Eliot Spitzer; Lanny A. 
Breuer, head of the Justice Department’s criminal division; and Cyrus R. Vance 
Jr., who succeeded him as the district attorney.

Looking back on Mr. Morgenthau’s career, Mitchell L. Moss, a professor of urban 
policy at New York University, said in 2011, “He turned the district attorney’s 
office into the premier law-enforcement office in the country, apart from the 
United States attorney general’s office.”

>From War to Law

Robert Morris Morgenthau was born in Manhattan on July 31, 1919. His 
grandfather, the real estate tycoon Henry Morgenthau Sr., was President 
Wilson’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in World War I and a prominent voice 
against Armenian genocide. Robert’s father, Henry Jr., was Roosevelt’s treasury 
secretary from 1934 to 1945, and his mother, Elinor (Fatman) Morgenthau, was a 
niece of Herbert H. Lehman, the New York Democratic governor and United States 
senator.

Robert grew up with his brother, Henry III, and his sister, Joan, in New York 
City, on the family’s farm in upstate East Fishkill, N.Y., and in a privileged 
world of estates, private schools and social connections, notably with the 
Kennedys of Boston and Hyannis Port, Mass., and the Roosevelts of Hyde Park, 
N.Y. He attended the Lincoln School in Manhattan and graduated from the 
Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts in 1937 and from Amherst College in 1941 
with high honors and a political science degree.

As a young man, he raced sailboats with Jack Kennedy off Cape Cod, spent 
memorable New Year’s Eves at the White House with his father, and in 1939 
roasted hot dogs for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth of Britain at the home 
of his Hudson Valley friends Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. (On leave from the 
Navy during World War II, he served mint juleps to Winston Churchill and F.D.R. 
on the lawn of his family’s apple farm.)

While studying at Amherst, Mr. Morgenthau met Martha Pattridge, a Smith College 
student. They were married in 1943 and had 5 children. His 1st wife died in 
1972. In 1977 he married Ms. Franks, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. They 
had 2 children.

Besides his wife, he is survived by the children of his 1st marriage, Jenny 
Morgenthau, Anne Morgenthau Grand, Elinor Morgenthau, Robert P. Morgenthau and 
Barbara Morgenthau Lee; the children of his 2nd marriage, Joshua Franks 
Morgenthau and Amy Elinor Morgenthau; and by 6 grandchildren and 3 
great-grandchildren.

In 2014, Ms. Franks published a memoir, “Timeless: Love, Morgenthau, and Me,” 
that focused on her long and passionate union with a man almost 30 years her 
senior.

Mr. Morgenthau had been in the Naval Reserve in college, and after graduation 
he went on active duty as an ensign. He passed his physical exam by concealing 
the near-deafness in his right ear from a boyhood mastoid infection. An officer 
aboard three destroyers and a minesweeper during World War II, he survived 
enemy attacks and won decorations for bravery under fire.

His destroyer, the U.S.S. Lansdale, was attacked by Nazi torpedo bombers in the 
Mediterranean off Algiers on April 20, 1944. Cut by explosions, the ship went 
down with a heavy loss of life. Lieutenant Morgenthau, the executive officer, 
saved several shipmates, leapt into the water and swam for 3 hours in the 
darkness until he and others were picked up by an American warship. In 1945 his 
ship, the U.S.S. Harry F. Bauer, was hit by a Japanese kamikaze plane off Iwo 
Jima, but its 550-pound bomb did not explode.

Mustering out after the war as a lieutenant commander, he enrolled in Yale Law 
School, finished a 3-year course in 2 years and graduated in 1948. He soon 
joined the New York law firm Patterson, Belknap & Webb and became the personal 
assistant to the senior partner, Robert P. Patterson, who had been President 
Harry S. Truman’s secretary of war.

Besides practicing corporate law, Mr. Patterson defended people swept up in the 
anti-Communist witch hunts of the 1950s, including the actor Edward G. 
Robinson, who testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and 
resisted blacklisting. “Unlike most Wall Street lawyers of that day, he would 
take loyalty cases,” Mr. Morgenthau said of Mr. Patterson, one of his early 
heroes. “He didn’t care what anybody else thought. He did what he thought was 
right.”

Mr. Patterson died in a plane crash in 1952. Mr. Morgenthau was supposed to 
have been on the flight — he had accompanied his boss on every other trip — but 
stayed behind to write a brief. Mr. Morgenthau was a partner in the firm from 
1954 to 1961.

On the Kennedy Bandwagon

After practicing law for 12 years, Mr. Morgenthau, who had dabbled in 
Democratic politics in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, where he lived, 
jumped on the Kennedy bandwagon in 1960 and became chairman of Bronx Citizens 
for Kennedy. His reward was appointment in 1961 as the United States attorney 
for the Southern District of New York, embracing Manhattan, the Bronx and 6 
upstate counties.

His most notable early case was the 1962 conviction of State Supreme Court 
Justice J. Vincent Keogh and Anthony (Tony Ducks) Corallo, a mobster who got 
his nickname ducking subpoenas and convictions, on charges of attempted bribery 
to influence a federal bankruptcy fraud case.

But after 17 months in office, Mr. Morgenthau left at the urging of the 
president’s brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, for a quixotic 1962 
run to unseat Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, a rising star in the Republican 
Party’s moderate wing. It was a fiasco. Distant and seemingly distracted at 
campaign stops, from which he sometimes wandered away, Mr. Morgenthau lost by 
500,000 votes.

After the election, President Kennedy reappointed him to the federal 
prosecutor’s job, and he waded in zealously. He created the office’s first 
special unit to investigate Wall Street and over the next seven years brought 
charges against stock manipulators, money launderers, tax lawyers and Internal 
Revenue Service accountants. He also indicted 150 organized crime figures.

Always close to the Kennedys, Mr. Morgenthau was with Robert Kennedy at his 
home in McLean, Va., on Nov. 22, 1963, when the F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover 
called to report that the president had been shot in Dallas. Years later, 
facing criticism for hiring John F. Kennedy Jr. as an assistant district 
attorney, he snapped, “If having a famous father were a disqualification, I 
wouldn’t have gotten my job.”

He had overwhelming conviction rates but lost 2 cases against Roy M. Cohn, the 
aggressive former counsel to the anti-Communist crusader Senator Joseph R. 
McCarthy. Acquitted in 1964 of perjury in a stock swindle and in 1967 of mail 
fraud in a bus-line takeover, Mr. Cohn accused the prosecutor of waging a 
vendetta against him.

“A man is not immune from prosecution just because a United States attorney 
happens not to like him,” Mr. Morgenthau remarked.

In 1968 he again convicted Mr. Corallo, this time for bribing James L. Marcus, 
a former city water commissioner, to win contracts for renovating the Jerome 
Park Reservoir in the Bronx. In 1969 Carmine De Sapio, the last Tammany Hall 
power broker, whose prescription dark glasses gave him a sinister air, was also 
convicted of conspiring to bribe Mr. Marcus, who went to prison for taking 
kickbacks.

A City in Disarray

After resisting pressure from the Nixon administration for a year, Mr. 
Morgenthau resigned as federal prosecutor in January 1970. He was briefly a 
deputy to Mayor John V. Lindsay, but quit to again run for governor. Short of 
funds and support, he soon withdrew from the Democratic primary. Governor 
Rockefeller defeated the Democratic candidate, Arthur J. Goldberg, in the 
general election.

Mr. Morgenthau practiced law privately until 1974. He then jumped into a 
special election necessitated by the resignation (and impending death) of Mr. 
Hogan, Manhattan’s district attorney for 32 years, and easily defeated the 
interim appointee, Richard H. Kuh.

When he took office in 1975, the city was in trouble, threatened by bankruptcy, 
public-employee strikes and a fraying social fabric. Buildings were abandoned 
and burned. Garbage piled up in the streets. Graffiti covered subways and 
buses. Crime was rampant, with 648 murders in Manhattan alone that year. (There 
were 58 the year he left office.)

The prosecutor’s office was in disarray, too. Many of its 195 lawyers had no 
phones. Its $8 million budget ran out halfway through the fiscal year. There 
was little expertise for combating sophisticated criminality. Case processing 
was inefficient, with different lawyers handling arraignments, indictments and 
trials.

Mr. Morgenthau streamlined the system, achieving greater speed and higher 
conviction rates by having one lawyer see each case through to completion. His 
growing influence helped win new laws mandating forfeiture of gains from 
criminal activity and limiting jury trials for misdemeanors.

His victories included the 1981 convictions of Mr. Chapman in the killing of 
John Lennon, and of a Metropolitan Opera stagehand, Craig Crimmins, in the 
murder of a violinist at Lincoln Center; the 1988 manslaughter guilty plea of 
Mr. Chambers in the strangulation of Jennifer Levin in Central Park; the 1989 
manslaughter conviction of Joel Steinberg in the beating death of his adopted 
daughter, Lisa; and the convictions in 1991 and 1992 of 7 men in the subway 
murder of a Utah tourist, Brian Watkins.

At the end of his last term, Mr. Morgenthau was 90 and had served three years 
longer than Mr. Hogan. He joined the Manhattan law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen 
& Katz. Besides pro bono work, he wrote numerous op-ed articles in The Wall 
Street Journal, The Daily News and The New York Times calling for immigration 
reform, crackdowns on illegal guns, and improved care for veterans of the Iraq 
and Afghanistan wars suffering from post-traumatic stress disorders.

In an interview with The New York Times in 2009 after announcing that he would 
not seek a 10th term, Mr. Morgenthau ruminated on the night in 1944 when his 
ship was torpedoed by Nazi warplanes and went down with 47 of his shipmates.

“I was swimming around without a life jacket,” he recalled. “I made a number of 
promises to the Almighty, at a time when I didn’t have much bargaining power.”

His deal?

“That I would try to do something useful with my life.”

(source: New York Times)








FLORIDA:

Jury Recommends Florida Woman Be Executed For Killing Her 6-Year-Old Daughter



A Florida jury has recommended that a woman should be executed for murdering 
her 6-year-old daughter.

That jury also imposed a life term on the woman for slaying her father.

A Polk County jury returned its decisions late Friday against 29-year-old 
Cheyanne Jessie for the 2015 deaths of her daughter Meredith and her father, 
Mark Weekly.

It will now be up to Judge Jalal Harb to decide whether to impose the death 
sentence.

Prosecutors say Jessie killed her daughter and father because she blamed them 
for the disintegrating relationship she had with her boyfriend.

She shot and stabbed them both, stuffed their bodies into storage bins and 
stored them in a neighbor’s shed before they were found 2 weeks later.

Investigators say she confessed after relatives forced her to report the pair 
missing.

(source: CBS News)