The longest-sitting judge in the city stood up today.
And while the retirement of controversial Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Carol Berkman is cause for celebration among the legion of lawyers she’s sparred with over the past 32 years, even her avowed detractors still call her a smart, always-prepared jurist.
“I have this reputation for being a mean old bitch,” Berkman, 70, said just before lunch, after hearing her last case, a gun possession, and stepping down from the bench.
“It’s the way I talk. I don’t pad it,” said Berkman, who is notorious for speaking her mind and acidly excoriating unprepared lawyers. “There’s a lot of crap that goes on in courtrooms,” she said. “Lawyers not doing their job. Lawyers not ready for trial. If you have no passion for this, why do it?”
Schooled at Cornell and Harvard Law, Berkman was appointed to Manhattan Criminal bench by Mayor Koch in 1979.
Her big press cases have included the 2008 Carnegie Deli Massacre trial, in which she presided over a rare double jury for the two murder defendants, and the 2007 trial of exotic-dancer murderer and heavy metal composer Paul Cortez, who she barred from performing on the witness stand a violent number called, “Killing Machine,” despite the throat-slasher’s protestations to her that she was misunderstanding such lyrics as, “Get ya steel need/ Bleedin’ on the killin’ machine.”
“He kept telling me it’s really a nice song,” she remembered today.
Then there was the 2007 student seduction-rape trial of Upper East Side Montessori school “beducator” Lina Sinha, at whose sentencing Berkman quoted from a Shakespeare sonnet: “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.”
Once, during a pretrial proceeding in the case, Berkman scolded Sinha’s defense lawyer, noted litigator Gerald Shargel, “Don’t tell an old grandmother how to suck eggs,” meaning, don’t tell me how to do my job.
“It was one of the most uncomfortable courtrooms I’ve ever been in,” Sinha’s lawyer, Gerry Shargel, said of Berkman’s mural-bedecked perch on the 11th floor of 100 Centre Street.
“I think she was ill-suited for the job. I think she could never keep her personal opinions on a case to herself,” he said. Still, “There’s no quesion about the fact that she’s a very smart woman, and she was prepared.”
“She struck fear in the heart of many a lawyer — myself not included,” joked veteran trial lawyer Frank Rothman, who’d jostled the docket to be her last case of the day, “just so I can say ‘you did me last,’ ‘ as he explained to her.
“I just want to say goodbye, and I’m a better lawyer for coming into your courtroom,” another veteran lawyer, Stanford Hickman, said after Berkman stepped down from the bench, shaking her hand.
Berkman would save some of her harshest vitriol for her teenaged defendants — tough love, noted her clerk, Pat Lawrie. “She would harp on them and twist them and question them to see what they were made of, and when they finally successfully completed their program, she made sure they knew it was their accomplishment, not hers,” said Lawrie.
“She made them own what they did wrong, and then she made them own their success.”