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Sol Wachtler |
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This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (October 2007) |
Solomon Wachtler (born April 29, 1930) is a New York State lawyer and former Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals, which is the highest position in the State judiciary.
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Wachtler earned his B.A. and LL.B. from Washington and Lee University.
He began his government career in 1963, when he was elected a councilman of the town of North Hempstead. He was elected to the New York State Supreme Court in 1968 and elected to the New York Court of Appeals, the state's highest court, in 1972. In 1985, he was appointed Chief Judge of the State of New York and the Court of Appeals.
Famous for the remark, "A marriage license should not be viewed as a license for a husband to forcibly rape his wife with impunity," Wachtler was a key figure in making spousal rape a criminal offense. (People v. Liberta). His groundbreaking work on the court also led to the broadening of protections for the disabled and racial minorities. His leagal decisions are catalogued in the Syracuse Law Review ("You Could Look It Up: The Judcial Opinions of Sol Wachtler on the New York Court of Appeals" Vol 52, Number 3, 2002) where it is said: "Judge Wachtler's role in shaping New York Law puts him in select company in the state's rich judcial history" (See also: "Wachtler praised as Conciliator, Jurist, Administrator, Reformer, New York Law Journal, November 13, 1992)
In 1988 Sol Wachtler began an improper affair with Mrs. Joy Silverman, 46, while the executor of an estate of which Mrs. Silverman was a beneficiary, he pleaded guilty to harassing Joy Silverman. He was found to be suffering from a bipolar disorder, but did not interpose a defense of insanity and pled guilty to harassment. He resigned as a judge and from the bar, and after serving 8 months under house arrest undergoing psychiatric evaluation and treatment, served an 11-month sentence in a mental health unit of a federal prison.
Since his prison time, Wachtler has written his own prison memoir, After the Madness (ISBN 0-7592-4519-3), and a fiction book, Blood Brothers (ISBN 1-59007-421-1, he contributed to the book Serving Mentally Ill Defendants (ISBN 0-8261-1504-7)as well as writing as a Critic at Large for New Yorker Magazine.
He is currently a Professor of Constitutional Law at Touro Law School and Chair of the Law and Psychiatry Institute of North Shore Long Island Jewish Hospital. He is a strong advocate for the mentally ill and has recently received awards from the Mental Health Association of the State of New York and New York City.
He was reinstated to the New York state bar on October 2, 2007.1
Wachtler lives in Manhasset, New York.
Wachtler famously observed that prosecutors have so much control over grand juries that they could convince them to "indict a ham sandwich."2 The phrase has become something of a cliché used in television legal dramas.
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