THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, June 9, 1994 TAG: 9406070150
SECTION: NORFOLK COMPASS PAGE: 10 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JOE JACKSON, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: 940609 LENGTH: Long
An open-and-shut case, any easy conviction, police believed. But when the case opened in the court of Circuit Judge Leonard B. Sachs, the narcotics officers were worried.
{REST} With good reason. Sachs suppressed the evidence when an officer testified that he had stepped between the young man and a taxi cab. This suggested physical coercion, Sachs ruled. The man was set free.
At issue was the Fourth Amendment, which protects citizens and their property from unreasonable searches and seizures. Police said the man voluntarily consented to a search. Sachs said the defendant was intimidated. It was a typical constitutional confrontation between authorities and the often-controversial judge who proudly refers to himself as a civil libertarian.
``I came of age at the University of Virginia where Jefferson is quoted every day, and it suits me,'' said the short, scholarly judge. ``People talk so much about the law - tough law enforcement, crime in the streets - but they forget that our law is based on the Bill of Rights, drafted here in Virginia to protect the rights of the individual.''
Last week, all that came to an end. After 14 years on the bench, the man referred to as ``the peoples' judge'' by some defense lawyers retired at the age of 65.
His retirement comes at a time of upheaval in the Norfolk court. Last month, a jury acquitted Brian McCray of murder charges in a hotly contested case. McCray was sentenced to 43 years in August by another jury. In December, a judge ruled for a mistrial because favorable evidence was withheld by prosecutors. An investigation by The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star showed a pattern of withheld evidence in seven murder cases in 1992 and '93.
Sachs was instrumental in assuring fair trials in two of these: the June 1993 hearing of 16-year-old Kelvin Jacobs, and the February 1992 case of Ricky ``Cowboy'' Lewis. In the latter case, the withheld evidence incorrectly painted Lewis as the killer of four children in a 1991 fire instead of as an accomplice. Evidence showed the killer was probably the state's main witness. Prosecutors sought the death penalty, but after Sachs inspected the state's files and found the suppressed evidence, Lewis got life.
``I don't think police investigations are that thorough anymore,'' Sachs said. ``Sometimes they cut corners, and the court hasn't called them into account for that. That encourages more corner-cutting. . . .''
Prosecutors haven't appreciated this attitude, nor their perception that Sachs is lenient toward criminals. But Sachs feels he was upholding the letter of the law. Battle lines were sometimes drawn.
Take, for instance, an October 1991 drug case in which Sachs threw out essential evidence taken from two suspected drug dealers because, he ruled, police had illegally detained the two men. His decision ripped the core from a six-month investigation of an Ocean View cocaine ring.
In a hearing on the evidence, Sachs ruled that detectives jumped the gun by arresting the men minutes before carrying out a search warrant in an apartment where they allegedly sold cocaine. Because they were arrested illegally, Sachs said, the case should be thrown out.
Newspaper accounts of such cases sometimes raised the ire of a public worried about crime in the streets. At one point, a Norfolk police officer was so frustrated by one of Sachs' rulings that he wrote a letter to the editor:
``It seems that Judge Sachs has never heard about the so-called `war on drugs,' '' he wrote. ``Sachs often disregards the (state's sentencing) guidelines and goes far below what they call for. Norfolk citizens should know that part of the war on drugs is being fought in the courtroom. In the case of Judge Sachs' court, that `war' has long been lost.''
Not everyone agreed. In 1989, Portsmouth lawyer Willard J. Moody Sr., the local dean of personal-injury railroad law, defended Sachs' decisions in civil cases. He wrote: ``Sachs' decisions have upset insurance companies and big corporations because he has a warm heart, blood in his veins and feeling for the `little guy'. . . while many corporation representatives have ice water in their veins and no heart at all.''
For Sachs, it all boils down to power - how it is used and abused. ``In the back of my mind, there has always been the realization that the history of my people is the history of the battle between the police state and the people,'' said Sachs, who is Jewish. ``I have never forgotten that.''
Sachs' father was 6 years old when his family immigrated from Lithuania to escape the Russian pogroms of the Jews. After Sachs himself was born, he heard family tales of an uncle with a long scar down his trunk - reminder of a Cossack who tried to cleave the uncle in two with his sword when the uncle was still a little boy.
Sachs grew up in Lexington, Va., where his father ran a general store and worked a farm. ``Lexington at that time was the deep, deep South,'' he recalled. ``I had a teacher who told us she sat on the lap of General Robert E. Lee. I went to a school where, when you got up, a boy would bow to the young lady the next desk over and ask `May I get you a cup of water?' and the girl would curtsy and say, `Yes, you may, sir.'
``My father hired day labor for his farm,'' Sachs remembered. ``This was hard work, and both blacks and whites worked together. There was one water bucket, one dipper. All these men joked together, drank from the same ladle in the fields, but on Saturday night in town they were separate. Different water fountains for blacks and whites, different everything. It always struck me as weird.''
Sachs attended the University of Virginia but enlisted in the Air Force before graduating. In 1953 and 1954, he spent 12 months as an electronics repairman in Korea. When he returned, he went directly to law school.
In 1958, Sachs came to Norfolk as law clerk for U.S. District Judge Walter E. Hoffman. He stayed through most of 1960. In the process, he found himself in the middle of history.
In May 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed school desegregation, but it took four years for that ruling to reach Hampton Roads. In September 1958, Gov. J. Lindsay Almond closed Norfolk's white schools under Virginia's policy of Massive Resistance. To keep 17 blacks from getting in, Almond locked out 10,000 whites, closing most of the state's largest school system.
On Jan. 19, 1959, Hoffman declared the school closing illegal. ``That day, I heard Judge Hoffman say something that marked me for life,'' Sachs recalled. ``He got the school board. . . and put them in the jury box. Now, mind you, many of these people were his neighbors, past clients, members of his church. He told them about the law and how they could choose to follow it or not. . . He said that if they did not follow it then he would see to it that the full sanctions of the law were imposed, which would probably mean that his friends would go to jail.
``Then, very seriously, he said: `Gentlemen, I will do my duty if it costs me every friend I have in the world.' I never forgot that.''
Sachs went into private practice in 1960 and developed a vast background in litigation, handling civil and voting-rights cases, as well as virtually every type of courtroom litigation except criminal prosecution. He played both sides of the fence, representing policemen charged with crimes and citizens charging officers with police brutality.
He was held in such high regard that his colleagues began promoting him for a Circuit Court position in 1977. He didn't receive an appointment that year, but was tapped in 1980 when a General District Court seat became available. In 1985, the General Assembly elevated him to Circuit Court.
His disagreements with police and prosecutors soon began, especially on sentence length. Sachs disagrees that his sentences are lower than other Norfolk judges', and a recent analysis by The Virginian-Pilot of the trials of all people charged with murder in Norfolk in 1990 and 1991 supports this. But he acknowledges that the public perceives him as soft on crime.
``I don't believe in harsh sentences,'' he said. ``If you brutalize a man with an over-harsh sentence, he grows bitter and you create a brute in prison. What does that do when he gets out? He commits a crime again, maybe even worse. But if the sentence is fair, maybe he accepts that justice has been meted out.''
The judge who has been a lightning rod for controversy was unapologetic as he left the bench. ``Virginia is one of the five harshest states in the nation for the amount of time served per crime per person,'' he said. ``This is in the country that has more people in prison than any other industrialized nation on Earth.
``If people wanted me to be the harshest judge in the harshest state in the harshest country in the world, then they'll have to criticize me. That's just not justice to me.''
{KEYWORDS} PROFILE BIOGRAPHY JUDGES
by CNB