40 | November/December 2022 | BAEC Bulletin Hon. Joseph D. Mintz Eulogy
Vince Doyle. He then went into private practice, doing primarily criminal defense, while founding and serving as the first administrator of the Aid to Indigent Prisoners Program. He was very proud of the program, and how it became the model for the 18-B legislation. After a key loss in a DA run, he was able to garner a nomination for Supreme Court, along with 9 other candidates for 5 new spots. He had some luck with his ballot position (despite losing a case that went all the way to the Court of Appeals) and some self-destructive campaigning involving a certain Amherst Town Judge and a robocall machine, and he finished fourth among the ten, taking the bench on January 1, 1979. In his first year on the bench, he was assigned the trial of Gail Trait, an unfortunate woman who killed her four children in some voodoo rite of passage. Her assigned lawyer, who was mounting an insanity defense, made innumerable and significant errors and did not conduct himself properly before the Judge. The jury found her guilty, despite Judge Mintz’s best efforts to get her lawyer on the proper path. He felt guilty himself, confessing to me that had he had this trial later in his career he would have done a better job of controlling the courtroom. But he made a wonderful record of all of the misdeeds of her lawyer, and the Appellate Division reversed the verdict and sent it back for a new trial. He was so proud that the Appellate Court agreed with him, and that eventually justice was done. It is also a measure of the man’s love of justice, that for so many years he followed this case, and did what he could to ensure that the right verdict was eventually reached. His reward for the lengths he went to ensure that every defendant in his courtroom received a fair trial, was to be cut out of criminal trials—they went, instead, to judges that came out of the DA’s office, and he was asked to do matrimonial and civil cases. He mocked firing us plenty over the years, but we always knew that he didn’t mean it. In those early days before IAS, he was sent trials, a lot of matrimonial cases to handle under the (then) new equitable distribution, and his two week stint in Special Term. Special Term was where he shined. He loved the challenge of getting the papers from Toni Domino a minute before the lawyers would argue their motions. I got to sit in the witness box to help him find the appropriate parts of the memos and affidavits to get to the answer, and most of time he got right to it, ruling from the bench.
The Hon. Joseph D. Mintz passed on July 30, 2022; We reprint below the eulogy delivered by Sharon S. Gerstman at his funeral.
I first met Joseph D. Mintz in September, 1980. I was a guest at my late father-in- law’s Friday lunch group at Hengerer’s tea room. The other attendees, lawyers, accountants, insurance agents and businessmen, all called him Joey. As a young tax lawyer, it seemed strange to me to not call him Judge or your honor, but he seemed to relish being familiar with the men he looked upon as his peers. As I came to know him so well over the next forty-plus years, that first introduction stayed with me, because it defined so well how he thought of himself. Being a judge was his job, and he loved it, but it did not define who he was when interacting with others. He had undergone no fundamental change when he put on “the black dress.” He would always be Joey.
over the years, I managed to pick up a lot just listening. A year later, through, for me, the luckiest of coincidences, I found myself working for him. We shared an office for several years, until the City Court Building was completed. Though my job started with working my way through a pile of “reserved decisions” from his recent Special Term, it was hard for me not to listen to him conduct pretrial conferences. He was really good at it, and over the years, I managed to pick up a lot just listening. By then, he was no longer doing many criminal trials, despite his extensive experience with criminal defense. After graduating law school in 1956, with honors, and as a member of law review, he started work as a public defender with his law school classmate and later judicial colleague, Vince Doyle.
He was really good at it, and
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