This short essay contains the presiding judges recollections of the case People v. Robles as a way to discuss public perception of fairness in the criminal justice system

Keenan, John F.

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The Urban Crimnal Justice System: A Case of Fairness

Fordham University School of Law

Fordham Urban Law JournalVolume 20 | Number 3 Article 141993The Urban Crimnal Justice System: A Case ofFairnessJohn F. KeenanUnited States District Court of the Southern District of New YorkFollow this and additional works at: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/uljPart of the Criminal Law CommonsThis Article is brought to you for free and open access by FLASH: The Fordham Law Archive of Scholarship and History. It has been accepted forinclusion in Fordham Urban Law Journal by an authorized editor of FLASH: The Fordham Law Archive of Scholarship and History. For moreinformation, please contact tmelnick@law.fordham.edu.Recommended CitationJohn F. Keenan, The Urban Crimnal Justice System: A Case of Fairness, 20 Fordham Urb. L.J. 579 (1993).Available at: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/ulj/vol20/iss3/14THE URBAN CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM: ACASE FOR FAIRNESSJohn F Keenan*Most of the writer's professional career has been spent in positionsthat provided him the opportunity to attempt to answer the two ques-tions of whether the urban criminal justice system is fair and whetherit appears fair. The answer to the first question is that the Americanprocess of determining whether an accused is guilty or not guilty isprobably the finest system ever devised by human beings. However,the fact is that the public perception of criminal justice is that somecases are not fairly decided. This is perhaps due to the fact that themedia will always sensationalize the rare case where an apparentlyunfair result is reached. The public's perception is often heavily influ-enced by the case that gets high publicity treatment, even though suchcases are the exception, not the norm. Face it - dog bites man - nostory. Man bites dog - headlines!Implicit in the first question, because of its focus on urban criminaljustice, is the issue of whether racial and ethnic minorities are treatedevenly in our large cities. The preferable way to address that questionis to refer to a specific case, rather than to make sweepinggeneralizations.I vividly recall one case that I believe stands for the propositionthat, although certainly some individuals who work in urban criminaljustice fail the fairness test, the overall system or process does not. OnAugust 28, 1963, two young women, Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert,were brutally murdered, literally hacked to death, in their apartmenton the third floor of 57 East 88th Street in Manhattan. They wereyoung career women, children of wealthy parents. Miss Wylie wasthe niece of a Pulitzer prize, winning novelist. The case receivedfront-page headlines, even in the New York Times, and came to beknown as the "Career Girl Murders." For months special squads ofdetectives from all over New York City, including the outer bor-* United States District Judge for the Southern District of New York; B.B.A.,Manhattan College, 1951; LL.B., Fordham Law School, 1954. The author served as anassistant district attorney in New York County from 1956 to 1976, then was head of thefelony trial bureau, the Homicide Bureau and finally served as Chief Assistant DistrictAttorney. From 1976 to 1979, he was Special Prosecutor of Corruption in the New YorkCriminal Justice System and from 1982 to 1983 was Criminal Justice Coordinator of theCity of New York. He has been a Federal Judge since 1983 and has presided over scoresof criminal trials.FORDHAM URBAN LAW JOURNALoughs, investigated the case, questioning hundreds of people and run-.ning down countless leads. The case remained unsolved.The following April a black woman named Minnie Edmonds wasstabbed to death on Chester Street in Brooklyn, many miles from East88th Street in Manhattan. Approximately ten days after the slayingof Ms. Edmonds, a nurse named Elba Borrero was returning homefrom work late at night in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, whereshe was attacked at knifepoint. Although the assault was interrupted,it was clear that her assailant sought to rape her. A young black man,nineteen-year-old George Whitmore, was arrested the next day,brought to the 73rd Precinct Station House in Brooklyn and chargedwith the attack. Mr. Whitmore, something of a drifter, originallyfrom southern New Jersey, allegedly admitted the attempted rape.'Because of the close geographic proximity of the Borrero assault tothe Edmonds homicide, detectives from the Brooklyn HomicideSquad were called in to question Mr. Whitmore about that crime. Hewas a very cooperative subject: he confessed to the Edmonds murderalso. The trouble was that he described the victim in the Edmondscase as being white. This disparity did not seem to trouble thedetectives.2One of the Brooklyn homicide detectives present at the 73rd Detec-tive Squad that day was among the large group of New York Cityinvestigators who had been assigned to the still unsolved Wylie-Hof-'fert murders the preceding summer and fall. He saw that the contents.of the Whitmore wallet, which had been taken from the suspect's pos-session, included a photograph of two young women in an open car.',The one more clearly depicted was a young blonde woman seated ontop of the rear seat of the open convertible: The photograph showedthat the car was in a wooded area. The Brooklyn detective then made'a serious error, which in that era of capital punishment could ulti-mately have cost George Whitmore his life. Based on photographs ofJanice Wylie that he had seen during the double murder probe, thedetective thought the blonde woman was Miss Wylie.When first questioned as to how he came into possession of thephotograph, Whitmore said that he had found it in a dump in hishometown of Wildwood, New Jersey. Under the "spell" of the detec-tive, who mistakenly believed the photograph to be of Janice Wylie,Whitmore's story changed - he had gotten the photograph from the.living room of apartment 3C of 57 East 88th Street in Manhattan, theapartment where the career girls were murdered. By the time Whit-1. The charges in the Borrero case were ultimately dismissed many years later.2. The charges in the Edmonds murder were also dismissed, years later.[Vol. XXPEOPLE v ROBLESmore's stay in the interrogation room at the 73rd Detective Squad wascompleted, he had confessed not only to the Borrero attack and theEdmonds homicide, but also to the slayings of Janice Wylie and Em-ily Hoffert in a sixty-three-page statement.George Whitmore was indicted in all three cases and newspaperheadlines proclaimed that the Career Girl Murders had been solved.Most fortunately for Whitmore, a young New York County AssistantDistrict Attorney in the office of the legendary "Mr. District Attor-ney" Frank S. Hogan, became interested in Whitmore's case and be-gan to analyze the sixty-three-page confession. To Assistant DistrictAttorney Melvin D. Glass,3 much of it did not seem to fit some of theobjectively known facts of the twin murders.4With the approval of Mr. Hogan, young Glass began an investiga-tion into the circumstances of the Whitmore confession to the Wylie-Hoffert slayings and into Whitmore's background. The Hogan officehad no jurisdiction over either the Borrero attempted rape or the Ed-monds homicide because those crimes had been committed in KingsCounty. But rest assured that the investigation by Assistant DistrictAttorney Glass unsettled and disturbed many in the Brooklyn Dis-trict Attorney's Office, as well as the high-ranking brass of the NewYork City Police Department. If Glass proved the Wylie-Hoffertconfession false, it would have a grave impact on the Borrero andEdmonds cases. While New York City has five district attorneys, onefor each of its five boroughs or counties, it has only one police depart-ment, and much of its prestige was at stake because of Glass's insis-tence on ferreting out the truth.Assistant District Attorney Glass correctly reasoned that the pho-tograph of the young woman on the back of the car was the key to thecase. If the woman in the picture could be found, Glass believed thatWhitmore could be exonerated. Thus began one of the most difficultand painstaking investigations in law enforcement history. Manhat-tan detectives were assigned to Glass's office with one task to accom-plish: to find the woman on the back of the car. For much of thesummer and into the early fall of 1964, the detectives combed forest3. Melvin D. Glass was an honors graduate of the University of Pennsylvania LawSchool and a member of its Law Review. He later became a distinguished CriminalCourt Judge of the City of New York and is now retired from the bench on which heserved for 20 years.4. The false Whitmore confession was instrumental in causing the Supreme Court'slandmark ruling in Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 456 n.24 (1966) (citing the Whit-more case as an example of how interrogation procedures may give rise to a falseconfession).1993]FORDHAM URBAN LAW JOURNALareas of southern New Jersey in an effort to find the place where thephotograph had been taken and to locate and identify the subjects.Finally, they found the area where the photograph was taken, theBelle Plain New Jersey State Park, some thirty miles from Wildwood.In late September 1964, the young blonde woman in the picture mi-raculously was identified and interviewed. She lived in Wildwood,New Jersey. She recounted the circumstances under which the photo-graph had been taken more than eight years earlier. She also estab-lished the identity of the second woman in the picture. Thephotograph had been taken at a picnic the day after the WildwoodHigh School Prom in May 1956. The Manhattan detectives, underAssistant District Attorney Glass's brilliant direction, traced the sec-ond girl to Philadelphia where she was then a schoolteacher. Thephotograph had been taken with her camera and had been in her pho-tograph album. When that woman, Barbara Mitchell, had enteredthe Peace Corps in 1961, the photograph album had been discarded inthe Wildwood Municipal dump. That was where George Whitmore,on April 24, 1964, had first told the Brooklyn detectives he found thepicture.Neither Barbara Mitchell nor Arlene Stocker, the young blondewoman, knew Janice Wylie or Emily Hoffert nor had either of themever been to apartment 3C at 57 East 88th Street in Manhattan or itsenvirons. The cornerstone of the case against Whitmore had been de-molished by Glass's careful work. The photograph had nothing to dowith the murders and it was the only arguable connection GeorgeWhitmore had to the murder scene.-The investigation of the Career Girl Murders shifted back to theUpper East Side of Manhattan. Robert Cruz, a drug seller, had beenslain in a dispute over the quality of drugs he had sold to a customer.The killing was in the northern end of the 23rd Precinct in Manhat-tan, the same precinct that encompassed 57 East 88th Street. Thecustomer, Nathan Delaney, had three prior felony convictions andfaced a life sentence if convicted of killing the drug dealer. Delaneywas arrested for the Cruz killing on October 6, 1964, and he quicklyinformed the arresting detectives in his case that he had knowledge ofthe Wylie-Hoffert slayings.At that stage, very few people in law enforcement knew that theWhitmore confession had been invalidated because of the Glass inves-5. The exoneration of George Whitmore and the subsequent arrest and trial of Rich-ard Robles were the subjects of the pilot program of the famous "Kojak" television series.The television name of the case was the "Marcus-Nelson" murders. See also BERNARDLEFKOWITZ & KENNETH G. GRoss, THE VICTIMS (1969).[Vol. XXPEOPLE v ROBLEStigation. Those few included select detectives in the 23rd Precinctwhere the Wylie-Hoffert murders were committed. Delaney wasbrought to Glass's office, where he carefully recounted how one Rich-ard Robles had come to his apartment at 330 East 84th Street, just afew blocks from 57 East 88th Street, at midday on August 28, 1963.Robles told Delaney and Delaney's wife Margie how he had bru-tally slain two young women in their apartment on East 88th Streetearlier that day. Delaney's story, corroborated by his wife, coincidedwith the known facts of the Wylie-Hoffert murders. It also addedsome previously unknown details that were consistent with the objec-tively known facts of the killings.Glass and his detectives immediately went to work on the Delaneyrevelations. Earlier in the investigation, Robles had been considered apossible suspect in the Wylie-Hoffert slayings because of his previousconvictions for sexual attacks in the neighborhood. However, theword of two drug addicts was thin material on which to base a majormurder prosecution. With the Delaneys' consent, their apartmentwas wired with a hidden recording device and Robles visited thereseveral times. He made several incriminating statements that wererecorded. On January 26, 1965, Richard Robles was arrested andtaken to the 23rd Detective Squad. His attorney was notified and waspresent in the police station.There, Robles confessed to the murders of Janice Wylie and EmilyHoffert. Robles was tried in the fall of 1965 for the slayings and wasconvicted of two counts of murder in the first degree on December 1,1965.6 The New York Court of Appeals affirmed his convictions.7Robles, who had recanted his confession, protesting his innocence,began serving his twenty-five-year to life sentences. Finally, in Au-gust 1988, while in prison, he publicly acknowledged his guilt in thecase in a televised interview.George Whitmore would probably have been convicted of the twinkillings were it not for the dedication, professionalism and intelligenceof Melvin D. Glass. In this case not only was urban criminal justicefair, but the ultimate result made it appear fair to any objective ob-server. Our system of urban criminal justice is set up to be fair, how-ever, fair outcomes are significantly dependent upon the individualswho work within the system. District attorneys have an ethical dutyto seek justice and, as demonstrated by Mr. Glass in the Robles case,when they pursue this duty to the full extent, fairness will result.6. The author prosecuted this case.7. People v. Robles, 263 N.E.2d 304 (N.Y. 1970).19931

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The Urban Crimnal Justice System: A Case of Fairness

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