"Our last legal heroes?: Fighting to kill the death penalty," by Evan J. Mandery. This is the beginning of the excerpt from "A Wild Justice," via Salon.
“In 1963 Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg dissented from the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the death penalty case, Rudolph v. Alabama. The dissent was a compromise with Chief Justice Earl Warren, who feared taking on the issue, and far less ambitious than the document originally envisioned by Goldberg and his clerk Alan Dershowitz, who had drafted an expansive memorandum detailing racism in capital punishment. At Goldberg’s request Dershowitz sent his memo to several organizations including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.”
In early November news of Goldberg’s dissent circulated through a suite of offices on the twentieth floor of 10 Columbus Circle in midtown Manhattan. Though one would never know it from appearances, this was home to the most important law firm in America. The twenty-six-story tower overlooking Columbus Circle was a grim appendage to the New York Coliseum, designed by Lionel Levy in the International Style, a branch of postmodern architecture the Nazis rejected as too austere. When the building opened in 1956, it had bad plumbing, inadequate heating, and was widely regarded as an eyesore. An architect with offices in the tower said the best thing about working in the building was that he didn’t have to look at it.
To add insult to injury, the firm’s founder, Thurgood Marshall, had been lucky to get this space. When Marshall tried to move the group from its initial, even more dilapidated home on West Forty-Third Street, real estate developers wouldn’t deal with him. Marshall had to turn for help to Hulan Jack, a Harlem politician who had worked himself up from janitor at a paper box company to Manhattan borough president. Jack imposed on Robert Moses, the legendary power broker who controlled the skyscraper under the auspices of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, to lease the mediocre space to Marshall.
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