The Federal Decide Who Offered Justice: A Assessment of Gary Stein’s Biography of Martin Manton
The famend judges who’ve served on the US Court docket of Appeals for the Second Circuit embody John Marshall Harlan, Thurgood Marshall, Realized Hand, and Henry Pleasant. Every was terribly in a position and completed, and every embodied a notion of the regulation that was bigger than himself.
Then there may be Martin Manton, who served on the Second Circuit for greater than twenty years and almost was appointed to the US Supreme Court docket however has been consigned to the ash heap of judicial historical past. That’s as a result of Manton resigned from the bench in shame in 1939, earlier than he was indicted on federal corruption prices. Nobody, it appears, desires to be reminded of the federal choose who offered his workplace.
However, as United States Justice of the Peace Decide Gary Stein reveals in Justice for Sale: Graft, Greed, and a Crooked Federal Decide in Nineteen ThirtiesGotham, Manton’s story is effectively value realizing. Stein presents Manton as each a typical and distinctive determine of his period. He got here of age in New York in “the heyday of ‘the racket,’” Stein writes, when the ethos of Tammany Corridor prevailed in politics and regulation. For a lot of, together with Manton, public service was interesting as a result of it supplied the chance for personal acquire. Then again, even at its peak, the tradition of Tammany Corridor didn’t prolong to the federal judiciary. Manton’s systematic sale of his workplace within the Nineteen Thirties—Stein calculates that the choose obtained improper funds of about $823,000, about $17 million as we speak—was unprecedented.
Stein’s biography of Manton tells an enchanting story of a bygone period whereas offering a well timed reminder that federal judges are all too human, and we must always not assume that they are going to be resistant to the temptations, flaws and foibles skilled by others. The continuing political conflict over the federal judiciary has raised skilled ethics questions on judges’ conduct off the bench—therefore the Supreme Court docket’s adoption final 12 months of a code of conduct for the Justices. Manton’s misconduct presents a simple case, because it was felony in addition to unethical. The broader level raised by his disgraceful profession is that whereas federal judges are human, they have to not have interaction in conduct that’s improper or—no much less essential—seems to be improper. We can not afford to dwell in a society during which justice is seen as a commodity on the market.
Portrait of an Bold Younger Lawyer
Born in Brooklyn in 1880, Manton grew up in Sayville, Lengthy Island, “far faraway from cramped tenement life,” in keeping with Stein. Although Manton later would current his life story in rags-to-riches phrases, in reality he was raised in a center class Irish Catholic household. After graduating from highschool with honors, Manton attended Columbia Regulation Faculty. Manton would later embroider this facet of his life as effectively, claiming that he performed soccer beneath one other identify, helped begin the varsity’s regulation evaluation, and graduated with honors. None of Manton’s claims about his time as a regulation pupil is verifiable.
After regulation college, Manton frolicked a shingle in Brooklyn. Energetic and bold, he developed a profitable private damage observe. Manton additionally took on felony instances and rose to prominence defending people in high-profile homicide instances. For an formidable lawyer on the transfer, political connections have been important; for an Irish-Catholic lawyer in Brooklyn, the Democratic Occasion was inevitable. Manton joined the Flatbush Democratic Membership and commonly campaigned for the occasion throughout election season.
In 1909, Manton’s political connections led to his appointment to assist defend a Brooklyn choose indicted for bribery. The choose, Henry Furlong, didn’t dispute that he had obtained cash from litigants earlier than him however insisted the funds had not influenced his rulings; accordingly, Manton argued, Furlong had not dedicated against the law. This argument was unavailing. Furlong was convicted and sentenced to jail at Sing Sing. Many years later, Stein notes, Manton would comply with the identical path and fare no higher with the identical argument.
After the Furlong case, Manton grew to become regulation companions along with his co-counsel, W. Bourke Cockran. They opened an workplace within the monetary district in Manhattan. Manton’s fame and fortune continued to develop, the latter on account of in depth actual property investments as effectively. Manton thought of operating for workplace and, in 1914, entered the Democratic major for a seat within the Home of Representatives from Lengthy Island. His opponent was the incumbent, Lathrop Brown, who was held in excessive regard by President Woodrow Wilson. Although it isn’t clear why, Manton abruptly dropped out of the race earlier than the first; in doing so, he appears to have earned the President’s goodwill.
Two years later, in 1916, Manton emerged as a number one candidate for a seat on the Second Circuit. President Wilson’s Lawyer Common, Thomas W. Gregory, “was searching for a candidate who could be acceptable to Tammany and anti-Tammany forces alike and would replicate the administration’s coverage views on antitrust and different regulatory points,” in keeping with Stein. Although Manton match the invoice, Wilson in the end appointed a sitting federal district court docket choose to the appeals court docket and put Manton in that now-vacated district court docket seat. On the age of 36, Manton was the nation’s youngest federal choose.
Appointment to the Second Circuit—and Nearly the Supreme Court docket
Two years later, President Wilson elevated Manton to the Second Circuit. At age 37, he was the youngest individual ever to serve on that court docket. (Realized Hand, maybe the best choose by no means to serve on the Supreme Court docket, and his cousin, Augustus Noble Hand, have been amongst those that additionally sought this appointment. Subsequently, every was named to the Second Circuit and served with Manton. Neither they nor another choose on that court docket ever was implicated in Manton’s corrupt schemes.)
Manton’s ascent to the Second Circuit was swift and steep. Just one increased judicial workplace remained, and Manton virtually scaled that summit as effectively. In 1922, Manton was almost appointed to the Supreme Court docket. President Warren G. Harding already had stuffed two vacancies—one with Chief Justice (and former President) William Howard Taft, the opposite with George Sutherland—when a 3rd seat grew to become accessible with the retirement of Justice William R. Day. Although Harding was a Republican, he felt obligated to nominate a Democrat. “In line with then-prevailing customized,” Stein notes, “a minimum of three members of the Supreme Court docket ought to hail from the minority occasion.”
Day’s resignation left solely two Democrats on the Court docket. As well as, Manton was Catholic and from New York—standards that have been essential to Harding, as there was just one Catholic Justice on the Court docket on the time and no New Yorkers. Manton’s supporters pressed onerous however Taft blocked the nomination. Fairly merely, Stein recounts, Taft despised Manton, viewing him as a “‘shrewd, crafty, political Decide’ missing within the fundamental ‘ethical qualities’ indispensable to serve in such a excessive place.” Harding appointed Pierce Butler, a conservative railroad lawyer from Minnesota, as a substitute of Manton.
Justice for Sale
As an lawyer, after which as a choose, Manton was closely invested and concerned in numerous companies, together with actual property ventures on which he had given mortgages. Whereas an appellate court docket choose’s chambers usually resembles a regulation library, Manton’s “have been bustling with exercise,” Stein writes, as “a gradual stream of litigants and lenders, attorneys and lackeys, enterprise associates and politicians,” and others, together with “underworld figures,” trooped out and in.
After the Wall Road Crash of 1929, Manton was deeply in debt and turned to commonly promoting his workplace to boost desperately wanted money. By means of intermediaries, Manton solicited funds from attorneys with instances earlier than him. The scheme labored effectively in difficult civil instances (patent disputes, litigation over company management) with well-heeled events on each side. All too usually, the attorneys or events pressed for cost concluded they may not afford to offend one of many three judges answerable for deciding the case.
In a single case, involving a patent dispute over the design of Schick’s electrical razor, Manton solicited funds from each side. Schick’s attorneys rebuffed the overtures and misplaced the case in
the Second Circuit. Manton’s grasp prolonged to felony in addition to civil instances. Drawing on beforehand undisclosed FBI recordsdata, Stein reveals how infamous gangsters—Louis “Lepke” Buchalter and Jacob “Gurrah” Shapiro—virtually definitely made funds to safe their launch on bail, over the objection of prosecutor Thomas Dewey. As soon as Buchalter and Shapiro have been out of jail, they started killing witnesses who might testify in opposition to them. (Dewey would flip the tables on Manton a number of years later.)
Along with promoting his vote, Manton had different methods to become profitable by his workplace. He leveraged his administrative authority to nominate receivers in chapter instances for kickbacks and investments in his companies. As well as, as a really influential official, Manton routinely requested for and obtained loans from attorneys and businessman who didn’t need to danger offending him by turning him down. Manton didn’t repay a lot of them. “Combining these loans with outright payoffs raises Manton’s whole haul to over $2 million, or about $40 million in as we speak’s {dollars},” Stein summarizes.
Resignation, Indictment, Conviction, & Jail
Rumors of Manton’s corruption swirled for years in New York Metropolis’s authorized group however no lawyer was prepared to danger publicly confronting the senior choose on the Second Circuit. It took an investigative reporter and a neighborhood prosecutor to set the wheels in movement for Manton’s demise. The journalist was Burt Heath of the New York World-Telegram and the prosecutor was Dewey, then the Manhattan District Lawyer. Though Dewey didn’t have jurisdiction over federal offenses, he might examine whether or not Manton had violated state regulation by evading New York’s revenue tax.
In early 1939, Heath wrote a collection of articles describing Manton’s “byzantine enterprise empire” and a suspicious $250,000 mortgage. Dewey promptly adopted with a letter to Congress detailing six situations “during which Manton obtained loans from litigants or others with enterprise earlier than the Second Circuit.” In his letter, the district lawyer said he was ready to current proof ought to Congress contemplate impeachment.
These revelations led Manton to announce his resignation on January 30, 1939, a day after Dewey publicized his letter. The Justice Division moved shortly to analyze and cost Manton. On the advice of one in every of his advisers—Thomas Corcoran, often called “Tommy the Cork”—President Franklin D. Roosevelt named John T. Cahill, Corcoran’s buddy from regulation college, as the US Lawyer for the Southern District of New York.
The energetic Cahill secured his first indictment of Manton by early March. Subsequent indictments adopted, alleging totally different unlawful conspiracies. In the end, to simplify their case for trial, prosecutors charged Manton with a single rely of conspiring to impede the administration of justice and defraud the US. Surprisingly, maybe, the federal government didn’t embody a bribery cost within the indictment. Stein explains that this “would have raised the bar for the prosecution and performed into Manton’s central protection: that not one of the loans and funds modified his vote or affected the court docket’s resolution, which in all however two situations was unanimous.”
In continuing with a one-count indictment, Cahill elected to convey shortly a comparatively easy and easy case to trial. (The truth is, the trial began in Might 1939, lower than 4 months after Manton had stepped down from the bench.) In doing so, Cahill sacrificed the prospect of an extended jail sentence for Manton. If convicted, the utmost sentence could be two years—precisely the sentence Manton obtained after he was convicted. The jury deliberated for only a few hours earlier than arriving at its verdict.
Manton appealed unsuccessfully to the Second Circuit after which the Supreme Court docket. Out of appeals, Manton served his sentence on the federal jail in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. After his launch, Manton spent the remainder of his life in Central New York, removed from town the place he “had been a dominant energy in [its] civic life,” Stein observes. “Manton went to his grave unapologetic.”
Manton died in obscurity. Stein’s excellent biography however reminds us why we must always know the historical past of maybe probably the most corrupt federal choose ever to serve. There might be no absolute assurance that federal judges might be sincere and moral, which is why applicable and reviewable monetary disclosures are important. The authority of the federal courts comes largely by the almost-universal acceptance of their integrity. We can not permit that integrity to be squandered.
Source / Picture: verdict.justia.com
