Irving Kaufman

Irving Robert Kaufman (June 24, 1910 - February 1, 1992) was an American federal judge.

Kaufman served as a United States District Judge for the Southern District of New York. He was later appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Kaufman excelled in school, and graduated from Fordham University at age 18, and from law school two years later. He was once quoted as saying:

The judge is forced for the most part to reach his audience through the medium of the press whose reporting of judicial decisions is all too often inaccurate and superficial (see [1]).

Kaufman presided over the trial of Ethel Rosenberg. Roy Cohn, the prosecutor in the case who happened to be a family friend of Kaufman, claimed in his autobiography that his influence led to Kaufman (a family friend) being appointed to the case, and that Kaufman had imposed the death penalty on Cohn's personal advice.

External links

• University of Missouri-Kansas City law school biography

Judge Kaufman presided over the deportation hearing of John Lennon, saving the Beatle from what he called the "labyrinthine provisions of the Immigration and Naturalization Act." On Oct. 8, 1968, detectives from Scotland Yards drug squad conducted a warrantless search of Lennon’s London apartment. The policemen found one half ounce of hashish inside a binocular case. Lennon pleaded guilty to possession of cannabis resin and was fined. Once in the United States, Lennon was denied adjustment of status because of a provision in the Immigration and Naturalization Act which excludes from the U.S. people who have committed certain crimes, the illicit possession of marijuana being one of them. (This section of the INA has since been made even more stringent than it was in 1975.) At his deportation hearing, letters from many eminent writers, artists, and entertainers, as well as from New York City Mayor John Lindsay, were submitted to show that Lennon would make an unique and valuable contribution to this country’s cultural heritage. The Immigration Court and the Board of Immigration Appeal (both of which operate under the Department of Justice, an executive agency under the President of the U.S.) nonetheless ruled that Lennon be deported. Lennon claimed that the INS had singled him out because the agency feared he would lead potentially embarrassing demonstrations for the peace movement. On appeal in U.S. District Court, Judge Kaufman countered the legal technicality used by the INS. The Judge held that under English drug possession laws "guilty knowledge" is not an element of the offense. In other words, in England, a person may be convicted of drug possession whether or not he was aware that an illegal drug was in his house. In American law, "guilty knowledge" is an element of a drug possession offense. Judge Kaufman ruled that since it was never proven that Lennon knew about the hashish in his London apartment, his conviction did not rise to the level of "illicit possession" as is required under American law. The judge therefore vacated the deportation order.

"Given, in sum, the minimal gain in effective enforcement, we cannot imagine that Congress would impose the harsh consequences of an excludable alien classification,’" the judge wrote, "upon a person convicted under a foreign law that made guilty knowledge irrelevant. We hold it did not." In his ruling, Judge Kaufman also made several insightful comments about U.S. immigration in general:   

"We have come along way from the days when fear and prejudice toward alien races were the guiding forces behind our immigration laws...Deportation is not, of course, a penal sanction. But in severity it surpasses all but the most Draconian criminal penalties. We therefore cannot deem wholly irrelevant the long unbroken tradition of the criminal law that harsh sanctions should not be imposed where moral culpability is lacking...The courts will not condone selective deportation based upon secret political grounds....The excludable aliens statute is but an exception, albeit necessary, to the traditional tolerance of a nation founded and built by immigrants. If, in our two hundred years of independence, we have in some measure realized our ideals, it is in large part because we have always found a place for those committed to the spirit of liberty and willing to help implement it. Lennon’s four-year battle to remain in our country is testimony to his faith in this American dream." This was an ironic twist in the history of Kaufman who had sentenced the Rosenbergs to death in 1953, purportedly on the insistence of his friend and prosectutor in the case, Roy Cohn, despite luminaries writing in to plea for the Rosenbergs to be spared the death sentence. These notables included the Pope and Albert Einstein who felt the evidence did not prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, that the Rosenbergs did not reveal vital information, and that the Greenglasses had committed worse infractions and were themselves receiving lighter sentences.