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

H. Lee Sarokin, a giant legal mind with an equally-sized conscience who served as a liberal federal judge for nearly seventeen years and later became a blogger writing about the wrongfully accused, died on June 20 He was 94.

President Jimmy Carter nominated Sarokin to serve as a U.S. District Court Judge in 1979, and President Bill Clinton put him on the 3rd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in 1994.

Sarokin overturned boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter’s triple-murder conviction in 1985, accusing prosecutors of invoking a racial revenge theory to convict a Black man before an all-white jury without evidence to support the allegation.  Carter spent nearly twenty in prison after one of the most closely-watched murder trials in New Jersey history.

Carter’s conviction was “predicated upon an appeal to racism rather than reason, and concealment rather than disclosure,” Sarokin wrote in his decision.  “To permit convictions to stand which have as their foundation appeals to racial prejudice and the withholding of evidence critical to the defense, is to commit a violation of the Constitution as heinous as the crimes for which these petitioners were tried and convicted.”

Immortalized in a Bob Dylan song, “Hurricane,” Carter was released without bail on his own recognizance by Sarokin.  After several appeals, the state eventually moved to dismiss the charges.

In a decision heralded nationally as a major expansion of the civil rights of the homeless, Sarokin ruled that 41-year-old Richard Kreimer, who had lived on the streets of Morristown for ten years, could not be ejected from the public library and other public places even if their “personal appearance and hygiene … interfere with the enjoyment of the facility by others.”

“If we wish to shield our eyes and noses from the homeless, we should revoke their condition, not their library cards,” Sarokin wrote in a politically unpopular 1991 decision that drew a rebuke from the state’s Democratic attorney general, Robert Del Tufo.

The appellate court later overturned the decision, but not before Morristown’s insurance company had paid out a $250,000 settlement to Kreimer.

Alleging prosecutorial misconduct, Sarokin, in 1989, overturned the conviction of V. James Landano, who had spent thirteen years in prison for the murder of a Newark police officer.  A Freedom of Information Act request Landano filed with the FBI revealed exculpatory evidence that prosecutors failed to disclose at trial.

But an appellate court panel reinstated the conviction and returned the matter to state courts for additional review.  Represented by Montclair attorney Neil Mullen, Landano was retried in 1998 and acquitted by a jury.

Also in 1994, Sarokin presided over the corruption trial of Essex County Executive Thomas D’Alessio.  The assistant U.S. Attorney who prosecuted D’Alessio was Kimberly McFadden Guadagno, who later became the first lieutenant governor of New Jersey.   D’Alessio was represented by famed defense attorney Michael Critchley.

As a District Court judge, Sarokin tried a civil case that eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in 1992 that the Surgeon General’s warning on cigarette packages didn’t shield tobacco companies from liability.  Sarokin had found in favor of Rose Cipollone, who had died of lung cancer in 1984, and ruled that the public had a constitutional right to know if nicotine was addictive and carcinogenic.

As a retired judge, Sarokin lived in LaJolla, California and created a blog, X-Judge, and later became a Huffington Post contributor and critic of President Donald Trump.  (Trump’s sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, succeeded Sarokin on the U.S. District Court.)

He also complained about “pre-trial shenanigans” by prosecutors.

“I think pretrial publicity can hurt a defendant, and I have a rant that I go on to all the time about prosecutors going in front of the cameras when they make an indictment and saying, ‘we got this person cold, and here’s the evidence,’” Sarokin said in a 2018 interview.   “It affects the (jury) pool, and I think it’s an outrage and I think it ought to be stopped.”

Sarokin’s path to a federal judgeship

The son of a local newspaper reporter, Sarokin served as a part-time assistant Union County Counsel from 1959 to 1965 as part of a bi-partisan package approved by the Union County Board of Freeholders: Freeholder Nicholas LaCorte, a former Elizabeth mayor and future state senator, resigned to take one of the three assistant counsel posts; Sarokin and John Higgins were Democrats.

In late 1977, when Bill Bradley filed a campaign committee to run for the U.S. Senate, Sarokin and Blair MacInnes were named co-chairs of his finance committee.

After Bradley won the Senate seat, he submitted Sarokin’s name to the White House as a candidate for one of four vacancies on the U.S. District Court.

About seventy candidates were interviewed by a Judicial Selection Committee, with fourteen finalists:  former State Sen. Jerry Fitzgerald English, Gov. Brendan Byrne’s chief counsel; Mercer County Prosecutor Anne Thompson; Newark attorney Dickinson Debevoise; New Jersey Bar Association president and former State Commission of Investigation chairman Joseph Rodrigues; U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Vincent Cammissa, Superior Court Judges Harold Ackerman, William Walls, Marilyn Loftus, Geoffrey Gaulkin, and Thomas Shebell;  Camden Municipal Court Presiding Judge Theodore Davis; former State Board of Bar Examiners Chairman Donald Rapson; Richard Newman, the former chief of the New Jersey Public Defender’s Office appellate section; and Sarokin.

There was speculation at the time that the state’s senior U.S. Senator, Harrison A. Williams, Jr., had agreed to back English after Byrne picked Robert Wilentz to serve as chief justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court; Wilentz’s father, former Middlesex County Democratic Chairman and former Attorney General David Wilentz, was a close ally of Williams.

Two other Democrats critical to President Jimmy Carter also weighed in: House Judiciary Committee Chairman Peter Rodino (D-Newark) pushed hard for Cammissa, and Newark Mayor Kenneth Gibson advocated for Walls, a former Newark municipal court judge and business administrator.

The Carter administration had asked William and Bradley to agree on at least one woman and one Black as part of the four-candidate package.   The two senators could nominate three white men by checking two boxes and recommending Thompson as the first woman and first Black federal judge in New Jersey.

In addition to Thompson, the senators picked Sarokin, Ackerman, and Debevoise.

The nominations defused the notion of a deal on Wilentz but created a rift between the two senators and Rodino; Williams and Bradley went to Rodino’s home to inform him of their decision.

While Williams and Bradley agreed on the four candidates in April, Carter only made nominations once Rodino decided to lift his objections.  That didn’t happen until September 29.

The U.S. Senate confirmed all four without objection on Halloween Day 1979.

In  March 1994, President Bill Clinton nominated Sarokin to serve as the 3rd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals judge.

Sarokin’s confirmation was not easy after conservatives accused him of being an extremist, radical judicial activist who was soft on crime, and Republican senators grilled him at his confirmation hearing.

But the Judiciary Committee approved Sarokin by a 12-5 vote, and the Senate by a vote of 63-35 – twelve GOP senators voted in support of his nomination — in October.

After eighteen months as an appellate judge, Sarokin, then 67,  announced plans to go on part-time senior status and requested that his chambers be moved to Southern California, where he was moving to be closer to his children.  He wanted to be temporarily assigned to the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit.

But a panel of his colleagues refused to approve the move, and Sarokin instead retired.

During the 1996 presidential campaign, Republican Bob Dole slammed Clinton’s record on judicial nominations, suggesting that another term would stack the federal courts with “an all-star team of liberal leniency.”   Sarokin was one of four judges Dole called out by name as an example.

A Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School graduate, Sarokin was a partner at Lasser, Lasser, Sarokin, and Hoffman before his nomination to the bench.

Sarokin is survived by his wife, Margie, three children, two step-children, and eleven grandchildren.