Judge Juanita Bing Newton worked as an assistant district attorney for eight years and served on a sentencing commission for New York State for two years prior to becoming a Supreme Court judge in 1987. It was in this position that she met Angela Thompson. Judge Newton presided over Thompson’s trial, and despite believing that Thompson was more a victim than a criminal, she had no choice but to give her a mandatory fifteen-to-life sentence for her minor role in a drug operation. Judge Newton was one of Thompson’s supporters in her successful fight for clemency.
Judge Juanita Bing Newton
I GREW UP in the South Bronx, a product of a New York City housing project. I came from what is the greatest value in society, a loving, intact family. I once said to someone, “You know, we weren’t the Huckstables, but we weren’t Good Times, either.” We were the very typical result of the migration from the South to the North. My father’s parents come from humble beginnings. My father was a farmer, a sharecropper. To paraphrase Stevie Wonder, in those days they didn’t educate colored people, so he never went beyond the fourth grade in formal education. After coming to New York City, he worked in the garment district. My mother was a school crossing guard, and then she became a paraprofessional in the public schools. She was a very resourceful woman.
We were a very close family. My father and mother both came from big families, so we had a lot of aunts and uncles. My parents were very active in the community. People went to work every day. Integration was not true in the North. There was de facto segregation and we lived separate lives. So, Sundays were not spent shopping and they weren’t spent going to restaurants. They were spent in church and going to somebody else’s house, usually aunts and uncles.
I’m a product of the parochial Catholic school, elementary and high school. I went away to college to Northwestern University, in Chicago. Then, I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. I finished school a bit early, and did what was obligatory in those days for women to do; I got my teaching license. My last quarter in school was spent doing student teaching. After a vacancy at the Evanston Township high school, I took over the class. I have a great respect for teachers, having had six months of experience. I taught high school social studies to ninth and tenth graders. It was interesting; the ninth graders were more diverse. The tenth graders were all problem kids. I think it was my first opportunity to look at young women, African American women, who may have been troubled. There was a large affluent African American population, but there are difficult kids everywhere. There was a particular government class that had only two girls and about eighteen or nineteen guys. Both of the girls, arguably, were troubled girls, but in their own way they also were very sweet. They had issues, but they were teenagers.
I think those girls were grappling with the kinds of things kids are always grappling with. They wanted to do what they thought the popular kids did. They really weren’t interested in an education for aca demic virtue. They weren’t interested in thinking great thoughts; they just wanted to get out of high school. They had issues with boys even though this was the early 1970s, which were interesting times. These girls were a little tough in the sense of being a bit slow socially. Clearly their vocabulary was peppered with expletives deleted. But we made it through the year. It was endearing also; in their own way, even the worst among them wanted to succeed. That’s the lesson that I took—no one really wants to fail. But it was enough for me to know that I didn’t want to do this right away. It was also a time that I was given a wonderful opportunity for a full scholarship to go to Catholic University in Washington, D.C., so I went. I no longer remember how I got involved in the law. I think that you go through the “what do you want to be when you grow up” kind of fear of the process. I know that I made applications to a couple of law schools, and I also had applications to rehabilitation therapy programs. I didn’t take that track; I went to law school. Also, I think it may have been an extension of school, as opposed to a determination of a future occupation. That’s why I tell people in law school that it’s a good thing, in that it teaches you a lot of information. It teaches you how to think, and you can develop transferable skills that are very valuable.
I really didn’t like law school in the beginning. I did all right in law school, but I went to law school and found people so hell bent on using it as a career enhancement. They had these great ideas about what they were going to do and they wanted to go to law school, or they wanted to go to big firms, or they wanted to go to the city. That was sort of interesting to me because that was not my sense of what this was for. I went to law school ignorant of what to expect, except maybe that people were thinking about important issues. Of course, you always gravitate to what is interesting to you. I can remember that the first time I was tempted to say something in law school was in my constitutional law class. It was about the Japanese internment case. I’m sure it wasn’t said with great eloquence, but I had to shake my head and say, “I can’t believe this.”
I wasn’t the first person in my family to go to college. My brother had gone to college and most of my cousins had gone to college. But I was the first person to go to law school. I didn’t know any lawyers personally, there were no lawyers in my family and we had no wealth. I sat in corporations class and they talked about debentures, and I didn’t know what these people were talking about. It was foreign to me. I said that the only thing that I would learn in corporations was Rule 10(b), and someone told me that if you knew that you somehow could work it into the bar exam.
I worked for the Legal Aid Society after my first year in law school. Afterwards, I worked for the Justice Department and the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), in my last year of school and during the summer. All of that took place in D.C. Then, I came back home to New York and got a job with the D.A.’s office, literally down the street from the housing project where I grew up. I did not intend to stay there for more than my three-year commitment, and ended up staying there for eight years.
I really enjoyed the work. I enjoyed being in the courtroom. I tell my son, my nieces, and other young people, “We all have some talent and it’s always there on the surface.” I also say, “I still don’t know what my talent is, but I do know that I was a pretty good litigator.” I had success as a litigator and I enjoyed the work. I think it was the first time it was clear to me that most of the victims of crimes, particularly violent crime, are poor African American people. I guess that probably is not as unusual as we think, and probably is a historical thing. It was interesting work, and worthwhile work.
District Attorney Merola was a wonderful person. Women were accepted and permitted to do the same thing that men were permitted to do. That sounds so odd to young women today, but in 1975 it was still very new. I remember that he once said, “I don’t know why all you women want to do this, but you make wonderful employees and you’re hard working and you’re good at it, so that’s all I require.” He was sort of an old-fashioned guy who was smart and lived in the real world.
After eight years in the D.A.’s office, I was looking for a change. An excellent opportunity was presented to work on a sentencing commission. It was a temporary commission that was created by the laws in 1984. The purpose was similar to the efforts of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines Commission. We were to look into sentencing policy in order to make recommendations for alternative sentencing, particularly determinant sentencing as opposed to indeterminate felony sentencing. I was asked to come on as deputy counsel. I worked with them for two years. Governor Cuomo took an all or nothing approach to the legislature. He said, “Listen, I can live with this and so I will take this report and I will put it in legislation. If the legislature agrees to it, I will sign it.”
I never had thought about all of those issues in a “think-tank” way before. As a prosecutor, I was more of a hands-on, get-it-done, case-by-case type of person. So this was a very interesting opportunity to look at these issues from a multidimensional perspective. I began to understand a lot of the philosophy and theories of sentencing and punishment, and computer models, and how we were going to increase the prison population. At that time, I met Jonathan Gradess, who was executive director of the New York State Defenders Association. Of course, sentencing from his perspective was very different. I worked with Michael Smith, who now is a law professor but then was head of the Vera Institute. His views were always practical in one sense, because he didn’t want to see the prison population increase dramatically; but he also was very philosophical in a sense.
We are a product of our experiences, so I’m sure that a lot of what I think about sentencing or feel about sentencing probably came from those two big chunks of my life: the D.A.’s office and the Sentencing Commission. After the commission, I was invited to come and work for the Office of Court Administration. Two significant mentors from the Sentencing Guidelines committee were Judges Joseph Bellacosa and Milton Williams. Judge Bellacosa had become the chief administrative judge, and Judge Williams was the deputy chief administrative judge. I worked for Judge Williams, and part of that job was also to work for Judge Bellacosa, doing court administrative work. I did that for two years.
It’s a fascinating business. In a sense, the courts are so uniquely different that we merit being a separate branch of government. Our concerns are different, and our approaches are different. The ultimate end product that we seek is both ethereal and tangible. We have to resolve the case, but we have to understand that it has to be done with justice. The bottom line is that there is a business side to the courts. There are widgets that we make in that sense, in that we have the constitutional imperative of resolving cases-in-controversy, but it matters that we cannot let them languish.
During that time, we were becoming swamped by the narcotics crack epidemic in the City, in the 1980s. The courts, as part of our legislative program, urged the legislature and the governor to create twenty-three new judgeships to help address the court system problem. I had just the requisite number of years since admission to the bar to become a judge, and it dawned on me that perhaps this was a golden opportunity. I spoke to Judge Williams and Judge Bellacosa, and both of them encouraged me. The position was a gubernatorial appointment to the Court of Claims, in 1986. I was one of twenty-three who were named, and I took the bench in January 1987.
I have been a judge longer than I have held any other position in my legal career. Although when I speak at programs from time to time, I do say that I think that thirty-six is too young to become a judge. I say that not because I don’t think I did a good job; I think I’ve been a good judge. However, there are things that you can’t do. For example, you can’t be political. Also, there are things that you will never learn from a different venue that you arguably could bring to the judiciary. So there are pluses and minuses.
I sat as a trial judge in Manhattan from January 1987 to January 1995. I’m going to come back to the trial bench eventually, but I don’t know when. I found trial work fascinating. I love being in the courtroom and I miss it. I even liked jury selection, as long as it didn’t take too long or was too repetitive. I liked the interpersonal dynamic in trials. The trial, criminal or civil, is one of the most unique procedures that we have in our system of government. Mostly, juries want to do the right thing in the worst way. It is an incredible experience. They want to hear what you have to say, and they want to understand. When it comes together, it’s a wonderful thing.
I remember the Thompson case very well, in large measure because of the outcome.1 The interesting thing about the Thompson case is that in the end, twelve judges heard this case and had to give an opinion one way or the other. They were evenly divided six to six, although the six on the winning side obviously were more potent. I believe in the appellate process and I have no quarrel with the decision. It’s just one of those things about being a lawyer.
Angela Thompson was indicted with her uncle. It was a multi-count indictment and she was included on just one count, literally the last count on the tail end. For the most part, all of them were A-1 felony drug counts, and it was clear that this was a case where the special narcotics units had information and were making a series of buys from this operation. I remember that I also did something that I rarely do, but it was appropriate. We did some pretrial hearings on the case, and I actually severed her count from her uncle’s count. It was requested and I granted the motion for severance because it appeared to me that her case was never going to go anywhere in the short run. The uncle’s case was never tried. He pled guilty, so her case went to trial.
There was a plea offer of three to life; actually, at one point it was probably lower than that. It may have been one to three. They weren’t really out to get her; they could care less about her. This was Specialty Narcotics and they were not your typical hard-nosed prosecutors, in that respect. They had a pretty liberal plea policy. It is interesting that I read someplace that Angela Thompson felt that she couldn’t plead guilty because somehow she would have been disloyal to her uncle, or been a snitch, or had to testify against her uncle. I wasn’t quite sure about that because I don’t recall any condition to her pleading guilty that would require her to testify or give any information or statement against her uncle. However, what typically happens when an accomplice admits guilt in the allocution, more as a shield than as a sword for prosecution, is that they ask the accomplice to admit that the person they were acting with was the named person in the indictment. You can’t use this in court as evidence against the other person for confrontational purposes, but it does prohibit the pleading defendant from taking the stand at the trial of the co-defendant and saying, “Yes, I admitted to doing all that, but it wasn’t with this person.” I don’t know if that was explained to her or not, but I read that she felt that the result would require her to give up her uncle.
She should have taken the plea but she gambled. I used to say to defendants, and I’m sure I said it to Ms. Thompson, “You know, this plea offer is too high if you’re not guilty, or it’s too high if you expect that even if you’re not guilty, you will be convicted. But if you have done this, then you really have to search your soul and decide what it is you are going to do.” Some people, like veteran defendants, come in and plead guilty, and their goal is to get the best deal. For others, there are real dilemmas. I suspect the greatest dilemma for a person who knows he or she committed the act but somehow feels it was justified, or the sentence is inappropriate, or he or she should be given a different chance, or should have a better offer, is to make this choice. Making this choice especially is hard if your counsel had advised that you have a certain probability of winning. Angela Thompson did not have a public defender; she had privately retained counsel who was a very good lawyer.
I don’t think that there was anyone in the courtroom who knew the consequences who didn’t say this was a tough case. I remember reading the probation report and saying, “My goodness, this is a tough case.” This is why I am a tremendous advocate of probation and probation reports, which I say as a footnote, because now in New York City where there are mandatory jail sentences, you’re not getting full-view probation reports. Instead, you’re getting what I call “fill-in-the-blank” probation reports. There is a sense that they don’t need to tell you a lot about the person because they have to go to jail, anyway. It was through this wonderful probation report that I found out who Angela Thompson was, what had happened in her life, and the fact that there were extenuating circumstances, in my opinion.
We send mixed messages to people. We all know and understand that selling and using illicit drugs is illegal, but you wouldn’t know it if you looked at television every day. I couldn’t be more against the legalization of drugs because I see what drugs to do people and their lives. I saw, for example, how my Bronx community was turned into a hellhole over the introduction of heroin into the community in the 1960s. We got hit with the Vietnam War, but home-side we got hit with the heroin wars. We are the product of our information. I guess it was very touching to me that Angela was raised in the family business, which happened to be an illicit business. Nonetheless, this was what she was involved in, and I’m sure she did it knowingly. On the other hand, when you’re seventeen and you have these kind of circumstances, what do you do? What should she have done? Should she have picked up and gone out and lived on the street? And if that’s not what she should have done, where should she have gone? Do you know? I don’t know. She was seventeen years old. What should she have done, where should she have gone, to whom should she have gone to free herself from this environment? Those are the larger questions of the lives of children.
My sense is that she was seventeen, and I meant it. These were critical times in her life. I’m not a Pollyanna. I grew up as tough as anyone. In my view, she should have been studying to go to college, preparing to go to the prom, and looking towards her future. As I sit here today, I think the message we need to get out in our community is that jail is not really an alternate life-style option. I don’t know that people understand that anymore. Instead, it seems to me that the notion of going to jail is not as horrible and unacceptable to young people as I think it should be. It seems that it’s almost the life experience that everyone is supposed to have. Where did that idea come from? I was on a visit to Bedford Hills about two years ago when I was on the governor’s commission on domestic violence fatalities. We held a public hearing at Bedford Hills for women to offer testimony. Many of the women who testified were there, at least in their minds if not objectively, because they were victims of domestic violence. They either had injured or killed their abuser or had been abused and subjected to a kind of abuse that led them to participate in criminal acts. It was interesting to hear these women, particularly the ones who were there because they did a “favor” for their boyfriends. They were “mules” in the classic sense of being asked to “carry this” or “hold that.” These are the things that you have to tell your children: you tell your sons not to ride in cars; you tell your daughters not to hold anything for anybody.
Substance abuse certainly is one of the reasons why we’re having so many African American women in jail. Crack caused a tremendous change in the population. Even though crime is down overall, we still see a lot of people in the court relative to the increase in narcotics crime. In a place like Manhattan, felonies are narcotics based, as in possession and sale of narcotics. There are more women in that range because more women are using narcotics, and it is a natural segue from using to selling.
Another case that comes to mind involved a young woman, who was sixteen or seventeen, and a man who was a little older. The thing that struck me was that she was in on bail of $5,000, and it was her first arrest. He was also in on bail. Her case was called first. There was a classic African American mother in the audience. This woman was on the edge of her seat from the time I came out. She was in a sea of people and she stood out. When the attorney came and the case was called, she was so anxious. The young lady had spent three weeks at Rikers Island, and she was seventeen years old, and she was beyond scared.
The lawyer came up and said, “Judge, I want to talk to you about bail.” And I said, “I don’t want to hear that. I want to hear something else.” He said, “Judge, I want to talk about bail.” I said, “Do you think I’m going to keep this girl in jail? Please, give me a break. That’s her mother over there?” He said, “Yes.” I said, “She is going home with Mom. We have to talk about something else because she has to get her attitude adjusted.” When we called the case, I told the young lady to look at her mother. I said, “Turn around and look at her. Now what is your problem? You’re going to stand on a corner and hold some penny ante drugs for somebody. Your mother is here crying her heart out for what? You have everything; you probably have too much.”
It was fascinating to me. I saw embarrassment and a sense of confusion because she could not explain this in a rational world. Maybe she could explain it in her world, but she couldn’t explain this, and she certainly understood that this rite of passage was not all that the people on the block said it was. So she pled guilty. We gave her youthful offender treatment. We got her in this program where she got her GED, and also a special program with Hunter College.
Over time, I increasingly realized that there couldn’t be a great disconnect between the judiciary and the community it serves. We can’t look at cases only as numbers and as opportunities for great legal discourse. We really have to look critically at what we do and what the outcomes will be. This is not to say that we make it up as we go along. As I tell jurors, “When I rule, I rule based on the law.” I’m very proud that in all the years I’ve been on the bench, I’ve never been reversed for an evidentiary mistake. But, I have had some sentencing issues that have caused me some problems. I think that when you come to the bench, you have an obligation to apply the law and to exercise discretion. I don’t know how you exercise discretion if you don’t consider the body of knowledge that you bring with you, including who you are and what you think. This affects your sense of what is just and fair. So I think it is appropriate to bring the perspective that you’ve acquired, coupled with learning from the community, your reading and your learning, and your application of the law.
One of my very first reversals was in a sentencing case, in which I sentenced an older White man who had sold several kilos of drugs. The negotiated sentence was six to life. His greatest mitigating factor was that he was ill. I believe it was a heart condition or something involving a major system. I was reversed in the interest of justice by the appellate division, and they reduced it to three to life. Now, in that brief decision, they spoke in terms of a factor that made it appropriate for them to reduce the sentence because of his illness. And that’s fine. That’s an objective factor, and I’m sure that an underpinning among the court members was that they were knowledgeable about what it meant to have this illness, and that’s fine.
Similarly, with the Angela Thompson case, I found that it fit within the Broadie criteria by objectively looking at the issues with respect to her and for the larger population.2 I looked at what we could expect and should expect in terms of what the sentencing should mean to her. I got involved in the case simply to decide what was the best thing for Angela Thompson. It was done in open court one day without the intention of making a cause célèbre. I never intended or expected that to happen.
There were several factors in my sentencing opinion. They included her youth, her situation, the fact that she was an orphan, and the fact that her choices were limited. It wasn’t just her youth as a number, but her youth as a basis for her not having any options. How many options do you have when you’re young, you’re an orphan, and you’re left in a household without direction or real choices? While she consciously did what she did, which was criminal and inappropriate, she never had many options to put herself in a different place and a different time. Those were big factors for me. Frequently, I hear, “Judge, this person comes from a good home and will never do this again.” And I say, “Well, if you come from a bad home, should you be treated worse than if you come from a good home?” That analysis escapes me. It almost should be, “Judge, he comes from a good home and we should punish him more harshly because he knew better.”
Once I promised a young African American male youthful offender treatment. The D.A. objected to it and the defendant wanted to speak on the record. We let the young man speak. In fact, I closed the courtroom, even to his mother for at least a time, because there was something that he wanted to tell me. There is nothing harder than for kids who are basically good kids to say that they’ve done something bad in front of their parents. He spoke about how he got into trouble because his father left his mother and the family, and there was domestic violence. The father burned down the house; it was just a horrible tale. The kid was basically a good kid and he was going to school. He was selling drugs on the side to help Mom.
Then we opened the courtroom again and proceeded to sentence the young man. I said to the D.A. who had been so angry with me, “And what would you like to say?” And she said, “Nothing, Judge; I’ll rely on the court.” Afterward, she came up to me and said, “Judge Newton, that was pretty amazing. I didn’t know anything about this kid. In some respects because of the press of business, we look at them as ‘cases.’” She said, “I promise you I will never pick up a file and look at it as a case. I will always look to see the person and the humanity if I can.” I think my talent is that I ask good questions and I’m curious about people. In the law, facts and information matter, for lawyers and judges. Informed decision making is the only kind that is acceptable, and it was the facts, all of the facts in Ms. Thompson’s case that affected me.
I would be less than truthful, though, if I didn’t say that her being African American didn’t affect me personally. As an African American woman, I look at the world from where I come, from where I stand, from where I sit. My view is not the same as the view of others, and this is why it is important to have diversity on the bench. Diversity on the bench is essential because you are a product of your background, your history, your ceremonies, and your life-style. All of that is important in decision making that affects the community and that speaks for the community in a thoughtful, rational way. We shouldn’t miss the opportunity to do what is fundamentally right. One of my favorite stories is the whole story of Gideon, where from nothing came a whole wealth of information and change that affected our approach to the issues of fundamental fairness and justice.3 Gideon’s little note that “I was convicted because I didn’t have any money, and I couldn’t get a lawyer” is a wonderful story for all students who go into law because they are convinced that justice is an important feature of what we do in this country. You never know when we have that story of the litigant whose needs are not just an answer to that little case or problem that they have, but affect a much broader level of justice.
I think one of the reasons the Thompson case and some of the other cases I see are touching to me is because of my sense that this is not how it has to be. One of the problems about poor people and African American people when they come into court is that the expectations are so low. There are people that have the attitude of “let’s negotiate” because there is no expectation that any of these people will go someplace further. It is fascinating to see that and to see how people look at these people. I think the most telling case I ever had on this issue was a robbery case in which I had read the file so I knew the defendants were incarcerated.
In this case, three twenty-something African American male defendants came out from the jail holding area. Their attorneys were anxious to step up to the bench to have a private conference about the case before going on the record, which is typical in New York. One of the attorneys said something like, “Judge, we want to make a bail application because the defendants are really not what they look like.” I looked at the attorneys, and I said, “What do you see? The bad thing is that you look at your clients and see all that’s bad. What is worse is that you come to me and you’re assuming that I see all that is bad, and that is very scary to me. It means that this is what you say to my other colleagues on the bench. I don’t know what you see when you look at them, but I see three young men.”
In my current position as deputy chief administrative judge, my task is to focus on justice initiatives. I am looking at the court systems statewide, in civil and criminal spheres, to develop programs that will provide meaningful access to justice for all people, regardless of their economic or social status, or race, creed, or color. Wherever I go, I ask people for ideas about local practices for perspectives that we can use as we continue this evolving process of the judiciary and the legal system. We want to eliminate barriers to justice, particularly for poor people. We are working on it. It is an interesting task.