[Marxism] Jerry Rosenberg, Jailhouse Lawyer, Dies at 72

[Louis Proyect]

NY Times, June 2, 2009
Jerry Rosenberg, Jailhouse Lawyer, Dies at 72
By SEWELL CHAN

Jerry Rosenberg, who was spared the death penalty for the 1962 murders 
of two New York City police detectives, and who became a pioneering 
jailhouse lawyer and a legal adviser for the leaders of the Attica 
prison uprising in 1971, died on Monday at the Wende Correctional 
Facility in Alden, N.Y. He was 72, and the state’s longest-serving 
inmate at his death.

Mr. Rosenberg, who was admitted to the prison’s medical unit in 2000, 
died of natural causes, according to a spokesman for the State 
Department of Correctional Services, who said he could not provide 
further details because of privacy rules.

“Of all the jailhouse lawyers, he was the greatest and the best known,” 
said Ronald L. Kuby, the defense lawyer, whose former law partner, 
William M. Kunstler, worked closely with Mr. Rosenberg during the Attica 
uprising. “He came of age in prison before there was widespread access 
to counsel for post-conviction proceedings.”

Mr. Rosenberg had already served nearly four years in prison for a 
robbery conviction in Queens when he was arrested and charged with 
killing two off-duty police detectives, Luke J. Fallon and John P. 
Finnegan, in a botched robbery of the Boro Park Tobacco Company in 
Brooklyn on May 18, 1962. It was the first double homicide of New York 
City police officers in 35 years, and about 1,000 officers were assigned 
to the manhunt. Mr. Rosenberg turned himself in, on his 25th birthday, 
at the offices of The Daily News, then on East 42nd Street.

Mr. Rosenberg and an accomplice, Anthony Portelli, were convicted of 
first-degree murder and sentenced to death. In 1965, the state’s highest 
court, the Court of Appeals, upheld the convictions but condemned the 
Police Department for severely beating a witness who testified at the 
trial. Later that year, Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller commuted the death 
sentences, saying that they could not have been imposed under a new law 
that virtually abolished capital punishment in the state.

Mr. Rosenberg began his prison sentence on Feb. 19, 1963. Another man, 
James Moore, who began serving a sentence for murder on July 12 of that 
year, is now the state’s longest-serving inmate, officials said.

Mr. Rosenberg, who always maintained he was not guilty of the killings, 
studied law through correspondence courses; he received a bachelor’s 
degree in 1967 from the Blackstone School of Law in Chicago.

Nicknamed Jerry the Jew — “he developed that moniker at a time when it 
was not politically incorrect,” Mr. Kuby said — Mr. Rosenberg soon 
became a well-known advocate for fellow inmates. (There is no record 
that he was ever admitted to the bar.)

During the Attica uprising in September 1971, which resulted in 43 
deaths, Mr. Rosenberg was the chief legal adviser for the uprising’s 
leaders. After the State Police retook the prison, Mr. Rosenberg was 
transferred to Sing Sing, in Ossining.

Over the years, in various prisons, Mr. Rosenberg worked as a porter and 
as a substance abuse counselor. From 1996 to 1999, he was a paralegal 
assistant in the law library at Wende, where he had been held since 1991.

Jerome Rosenberg was born on May 23, 1937. Prison officials said that 
Mr. Rosenberg had at least two brothers, a wife and a son, but that they 
were not permitted to identify them and did not know whether any of them 
was still living. At the time of his arrest in 1962, Mr. Rosenberg was 
reported to have had a young daughter by a former wife.

Mr. Rosenberg was the subject of a biography by Stephen Bello, “Doing 
Life: The Extraordinary Saga of America’s Greatest Jailhouse Lawyer,” 
published by St. Martin’s Press in 1982 and later made into a television 
movie, starring Tony Danza, in 1986.

In the biography, Mr. Rosenberg is quoted saying that anyone who was to 
become a lawyer ought to “do some time in jail.”

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Ron Kuby on Jerry Rosenberg: 
http://airamerica.com/doingtime/blog/2009/jun/02/jailhouse-lawyer-jerry-jew-dies-can