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Wednesday, March 27, 2024 | Back issues
Courthouse News Service Courthouse News Service

Brooklyn Federal Judge, Appointed by LBJ, Dies at 99

U.S. District Judge Jack B. Weinstein is remembered as prioritizing humanity throughout his five-decade term, calling out the cruelty of minimum sentences and the drug cases where they abound.

BROOKLYN (CN) — Jack B. Weinstein, a trailblazing federal judge who sought to transform criminal justice, died on Tuesday, several months past the one-year anniversary of his retirement from the Eastern District of New York. 

Weinstein was two months shy of his 100th birthday. Remarkably, he maintained a full caseload before he shifted to inactive duty in February of last year, ending 53 years on the bench — eight of which he spent as chief judge — that earned him the designation of being one of the longest-serving federal judges in American history.

An appointee of former President Lyndon B. Johnson, Judge Weinstein is remembered as an iconoclastic presence in Brooklyn who aimed to bring a sense of humanity and empathy to his job. 

In 1993, he refused to preside over narcotics cases, explaining that he had a “sense of depression about much of the cruelty I have been party to in connection with the war on drugs,” and protesting the harsh minimum sentences he would be obligated to hand down. 

Weinstein also pushed to reform sentencing for people facing substance addictions, and rallied against mass incarceration. During sentencing hearings, Weinstein famously sat among the defendants and their families, leveling the physical space created by his position on the bench. 

Early in his tenure, while overseeing school desegregation cases, the judge would take his efforts to the streets, traveling to school districts to take a look around. 

“Sometimes seeing subtle interactions, you get a sense of what’s going on that you can’t get from cold record,” Weinstein told Courthouse News in 2012. 

“We judges don’t know what’s going on in the real world,” the judge said in that interview, conducted at his chambers in Brooklyn. “You’re really dealing with human beings here, and that’s a really difficult kind of problem.”

Weinstein's prioritization of humanity would continue throughout his career. He presided over mass tort cases including a class action concerning Agent Orange, the chemical used by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War, which is said to have caused birth defects and cancer among Vietnamese civilians and veterans, and designed a fund for claims against the manufacturers, wrote The New York Times.

The judge also oversaw lawsuits concerning asbestos, tobacco, handguns, breast implants and diethylstilbestrol, an anti-miscarriage drug.

Born in Wichita, Kansas, Weinstein grew up in the New York City borough where he would later oversee federal cases. He attended Brooklyn’s Abraham Lincoln High School. 

To help provide for his family during the Depression, he delivered groceries and milk, also working on trucks and docks, while taking night classes at Brooklyn College. He graduated in 1943. 

During World War II, Weinstein enlisted in the U.S. Navy, where he rose to the rank of lieutenant. After graduating from Columbia Law School in 1948, he worked as a law clerk to New York State Court of Appeals Judge Stanley Fuld, then, after a two-year stint in private practice, returned to Columbia as a professor. 

President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Weinstein to the bench in 1967. 

“The Judiciary has lost a national treasure,” Chief Judge Margo K. Brodie said in a statement about the passing of her Brooklyn federal court colleague. 

“Beyond his monumental contributions to the law, Judge Weinstein will be remembered for his dedication to family, including his family of law clerks and his EDNY family; for his infectious love and embrace of life, culture, and friendship; and for his relentless pursuit of knowledge and enrichment,” Brodie wrote.

“He was kind, generous, and supportive of everyone in the EDNY family, including regularly sending handwritten notes of congratulations and encouragement to his colleagues.”

Brodie pointed to several examples of Weinstein’s accomplishments, including creating a fund for pro bono representation of civil litigants and forming a committee to protect the constitutional right to representation of indigent defendants. 

Weinstein championed work to make magistrate judges more visible, “a trend replicated nationally,” and helped other judges tackle a mountainous backlog, Brodie said. 

“Even after his term as chief judge, Judge Weinstein continued to innovate and to assist his colleagues in any way he could,” she wrote, “once clearing a backlog of approximately five hundred state habeas petitions single-handedly.”

Weinstein is survived by his wife, Susan Berk, whom he married in 2014; his sons Seth, Michael and Howard; stepchildren Ronnie Rosenberg and Stephanie Berlin; two grandchildren; and four step-grandchildren, according to The New York Times.

"We lost a great man for all people," Susan Berk told Law360. "Just that one sentence tells you everything." 

U.S. District Judge I. Leo Glasser served as a U.S. Army technician from 1943 to 1946 — the same years that Weinstein had served in the Navy — and was nominated to the bench in 1981 by President Ronald Reagan. 

Glasser said on Wednesday that he had very little to add to others’ accounts memorializing the 99-year-old Judge Weinstein, which he called thoughtful and sensitive. 

“I’m sure that everybody who you would be asking about Judge Weinstein would probably make the same response,” Glasser told Courthouse News. “He was a very unusual and remarkable man, in addition to being a great judge.” 


Read more Courthouse News reporting about cases over which Judge Weinstein presided:

Islamic State Backer Earns Sympathy at Sentencing
Ex-NY Assemblywoman Harris Gets 6 Months for Fraud
Judge Blasted for Light Child Porn Sentencing
Trial Slated for Hellish Greyhound Bus Ride
Judge Extends Abortion-Clinic Law to Falun Gong
Judge Urges Drug Reform in Sentencing of Addicts

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