In Judgment and Mercy, Martin J. Siegel offers an insightful and
compelling biography of Irving Robert Kaufman, the judge infamous
for condemning Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to death for atomic
espionage. In 1951, world attention fixed on Kaufman's courtroom as
its ambitious young occupant stridently blamed the Rosenbergs for
the Korean War. To many, the harsh sentences and their preening
author left an enduring stain on American justice. But then the
judge from Cold War central casting became something unexpected:
one of the most illustrious progressive jurists of his day.
Upending the simplistic portrait of Judge Kaufman as a McCarthyite
villain, Siegel shows how his pathbreaking decisions desegregated a
Northern school for the first time, liberalized the insanity
defense, reformed Attica-era prisons, spared John Lennon from
politically motivated deportation, expanded free speech, brought
foreign torturers to justice, and more. Still, the Rosenberg
controversy lingered. Decades later, changing times and revelations
of judicial misconduct put Kaufman back under siege. Picketers
dogged his footsteps as critics demanded impeachment. And tragedy
stalked his family, attributed in part to the long ordeal. Instead
of propelling him to the Supreme Court, as Kaufman once hoped, the
case haunted him to the end. Absorbingly told, Judgment and Mercy
brings to life a complex man by turns tyrannical and warm, paranoid
and altruistic, while revealing intramural Jewish battles over
assimilation, class, and patriotism. Siegel, who served as
Kaufman's last law clerk, traces the evolution of American law and
politics in the twentieth century and shows how a judge unable to
summon mercy for the Rosenbergs nonetheless helped expand freedom
for all.
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