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Albert Tomei ’64 (1940–2017)
Albert Tomei, who earned both his law degree and a master’s degree from Brooklyn Law School, served more than three decades on the New York bench and became best known for his pivotal role in the litigation that dismantled the state’s revived death-penalty law. In 1997, in the first capital case brought in New York City under the 1995 statute, he ruled a key plea-bargaining provision unconstitutional, quoted in the New York Times, “What is forbidden is a scheme, like New York’s, in which the possibility of death only arises from the defendant’s exercise of his right to a jury trial.” Though the ruling was initially overturned, the Court of Appeals unanimously upheld his reasoning the next year. Known for his direct, plainspoken style, Tomei also wrote about moments of unexpected compassion he witnessed in court, recalling in a 1997 Times Op-Ed, a grandmother who told a young man convicted of murder, “I could not hate you. I feel sorry for you because you made a wrong choice.”
Keywords
New York bench, Litigation, Death Penalty