FRANKFURTER RECALLS HIS EARLY YEARS WORKING UNDER
HENRY STIMSON IN THE U.S. ATTORNEY’S OFFICE IN NEW YORK:
“MY EXPERIENCE WITH HIM IS TO NO SMALL DEGREE RESPONSIBLE
FOR MY ATTITUDE TOWARDS LEGAL ISSUES RAISED BY THE THIRD DEGREE,
WIRE-TAPPING, UNREASONABLE SEARCH AND SEIZURE, ETC.”

FELIX FRANKFURTER. Typed Letter Signed to Judge Stanley H. Fuld, Washington, DC, 9 May 1956. 1 page, 10½" x 8", on his U.S. Supreme Court stationery.

A remarkably long, personal, and insightful letter from Felix Frankfurter, the eminent legal scholar who taught at Harvard Law School from 1914 to 1939 and who served as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1939 to 1962. He writes here to Stanley Fuld, a noted judge on the New York State Court of Appeals, about the case of Camilo Leyra who had been convicted of murdering his elderly parents.

Frankfurter knew of Leyra’s case for it had reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954, resulting in a significant decision holding that evidence obtained in the aftermath of a coerced confession and from a defendant unprotected by counsel was tainted and inadmissible in court. In Leyra’s case, that tainted evidence consisted of several additional confessions obtained immediately after the first coerced one.

Following the Supreme Court’s decision, Leyra had been retried and reconvicted, but in April 1956, New York’s Court of Appeals overturned this later conviction, and ordered the indictment dismissed and Leyra released. In his majority opinion, Judge Fuld criticized the police and prosecution, asserting that “the prosecution has produced not a single trustworthy bit of affirmative, independent evidence connecting defendant with the crime.... It may well be that the law enforcement officials, relying too heavily on the ‘confessions’ that they had obtained..., failed to do the essential careful and intensive investigatory work that should be done before a defendant is charged with crime, certainly with one as serious as murder.”

Here Frankfurter praises Fuld’s opinion and relates it to his own early experiences in the field of criminal law. “It is irrelevant if not, indeed, impertinent to congratulate a judge on what he does in [the] course of his judicial duty,” Frankfurter opens. “Well, I am not congratulating your Court or you on the decision in Leyra. I merely want to tell you how greatly pleased I am by your remarks, toward the end of your opinion, about the inadequacies and laziness in police and prosecutorial work that so often render abortive vindication of the criminal law.

“My years under Mr. Stimson, in the United States Attorney’s Office, drove that truth home to me,” Frankfurter continues, “and my experience with him is to no small degree responsible for my attitude towards legal issues raised by the third degree, wire-tapping, unreasonable search and seizure, etc., etc. Judged by the results at trials and on appeal, there could hardly have been a more successful prosecutor than Henry L. Stimson. But he would not tolerate resort to third degrees and wire-tapping, and on many a wintry morning did Tommy Thacher and I have to get up early and accompany Chief Flynn, of the Secret Service, to make sure that the searches his people made kept within the confines of the search warrants they were executing.” He has signed in full, “Felix Frankfurter.”

Not long after his graduation from Harvard Law School in 1906, Frankfurter went to work for Henry L. Stimson, then the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Frankfurter was so impressed by his boss that he managed Stimson’s unsuccessful campaign for Governor of New York in 1910 on a Progressive-Republican ticket. From 1911 to 1914, Frankfurter worked again for Stimson when he was Secretary of War in the Taft administration.

More importantly, in future years, both as a legal scholar and as a jurist, Frankfurter showed great concern for procedural fairness in criminal cases, and he regularly criticized questionable police procedures such as warrantless searches or coercive interrogations that he believed resulted in a lack of due process. In particular, as one biographer has noted, over “the course of his judicial career, Frankfurter spoke out in capital cases where criminal defendants faced execution under circumstances that suggested to him that their accusers had played fast and loose with the basic rules of criminal justice” (see the profile of Frankfurter in American National Biography Online).

For the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Leyra’s case, see Leyra v. Denno, 347 U.S. 556 (1954); for the New York Court of Appeals decision that Frankfurter is discussing in this letter, see People v. Leyra, 1 N.Y.2d 199, 134 N.E.2d 475 (1956).

The letter is written on Frankfurter’s engraved Supreme Court stationery. It has two punch holes in the blank left margin and a few other trifling flaws, but is overall in very good condition.

A letter of exceptional content from Frankfurter. $2500.00

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