Irving Kaufman, Rosenbergs` Judge

February 03, 1992|By New York Times News Service.

NEW YORK — Irving R. Kaufman, who gained national attention in 1951 as the judge who sentenced Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair and who wrote landmark decisions in 1st Amendment, antitrust and civil rights cases for more than 30 years on the federal bench, died Saturday night in the Mount Sinai Medical Center.

He was 81 and lived in Manhattan. He died of pancreatic cancer, his family said.

It was Mr. Kaufman`s hope that he would be remembered for his role not in the Rosenberg case, the espionage trial of the century, but as the judge whose order was the first to desegregate a public school in the North; who was instrumental in streamlining court procedures, who rendered innovative decisions in antitrust law and, most of all, whose decisions expanded freedom of the press.

The Rosenbergs were convicted of conspiring to deliver secrets of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union in World War II.

The trial became a cause celebre for the left, which still contends that the Rosenbergs and their co-defendant were framed in a paroxysm of anti-Red hysteria.

Mr. Kaufman`s decision to impose the death sentences remain the sole death sentences ever carried out in the U.S. for espionage by American civilians.

In 1971, Kaufman dissented in the case of the United States vs. The New York Times, when the court ruled that publishing the Pentagon Papers would threaten national security enough to justify prior restraint. The Supreme Court, agreeing with Kaufman, reversed the decision.

Kaufman`s order to desegregate an elementary school in the North, a first, came in 1961, in Taylor vs. Board of Education. In requiring the desegregation of the almost wholly black Lincoln School in New Rochelle in Westchester County, N.Y., Kaufman said, ``Compliance with the Supreme Court`s (1954) edict was not to be less forthright in the North than in the South.``

In antitrust law, his ruling in Berkey vs. Kodak (1979) is considered a landmark.