Opinion

The slapdown the stop-and-frisk judge deserved

It would come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the jurisprudence of federal Judge Shira Scheindlin that the Second Circuit Court of Appeals would stay her ruling against New York City in the landmark stop-and-frisk case and remove her from the case. Over the years she has proven herself to be the quintessential liberal activist judge with an obvious anti-police bias.

The appellate court ruled that Scheindlin “ran afoul” of the judiciary’s code of conduct by showing an “appearance of partiality surrounding the litigation” by steering the lawsuit to her courtroom. The court also found that when city officials complained about Scheindlin’s lack of objectivity, she violated additional ethical rules by embarking on an unprecedented public-relations campaign and granting a series of interviews to media outlets while the case was still pending.

Scheindlin has a history of twisting the facts and the law to reach an ideologically desired result, and there is a strong argument that she followed the same course in the stop-and-frisk litigation: cherry-picking facts, massaging statistics and spinning the law while disregarding reality and legal precedent.

If Scheindlin’s name sounds familiar to people interested in law enforcement, it should. In 2006 she manipulated facts and ignored crystal-clear legal precedents to order a new trial for left-wing revolutionary, Judith Clark, who was convicted of multiple murders in the infamous 1981 Brinks robbery case in Rockland County.

The judge ruled Clark was deprived of her right to be present at trial even though Clark, in the thrall of her revolutionary zeal, refused to recognize the court’s authority and freely chose not to attend her trial.

I personally argued the appeal of Scheindlin’s poorly reasoned ruling before the same Second Circuit Court of Appeals. That court unanimously overruled Scheindlin on every issue it addressed.

In her recent PR tour, when questioned by The New York Law Journal about the Brinks case, Scheindlin admitted that the Second Circuit was correct in its reading of precedents, but that she had ruled the way she did because she “hoped they [the appellate court] would take a fresh look” at the issue. In other words, she ignored the law to advance her ideological agenda.

That’s Scheindlin, and that’s exactly what she did in the stop-and-frisk litigation. Her goal wasn’t just to “reform” stop-and frisk, but to make it so ineffective as to kill it. That’s why her “remedies” included appointing an advisory panel to the court-appointed monitor dominated by ultra-liberal, ACLU-friendly law professors.

New York City still isn’t out of the woods on what appears to be a disturbingly biased and disingenuous judicial process. If elected mayor, Bill de Blasio has promised to withdraw the city’s appeal, leaving Scheindlin’s ruling in place and setting a terrible precedent for future pro-active policing programs. The ramifications for law-abiding citizens would be profound.

Without stop-and-frisk, and with a mayor who possesses little to no knowledge of policing, a crime spike is inevitable. De Blasio, true to his “democratic socialist” soul, will claim the crime spike was due to the underfunding of programs for the needy. He will call for higher taxes to fund every crackpot program imaginable in a quixotic quest to create a statist utopia.

He, like Scheindlin, never has understood, and never will, that tough-on-crime tactics played the critical role in New York’s historic crime drop.

Michael E. Bongiorno was Rockland County DA from 1995 to 2007.