John E. Sprizzo, judge known for his temper
NEW YORK - John E. Sprizzo - a federal judge known equally for his intellect and for a temper that once led him to accuse prosecutors of forcing him, through their incompetence, to release drug dealers onto the streets, qualities that made him one of the more colorful court presences in the Southern District of New York - died Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 73 and lived in Manhattan.
The cause was organ failure, said Howard Zelbo, a friend and former law clerk of Judge Sprizzo's.
Judge Sprizzo was recommended for the federal bench by a Democratic senator, Daniel P. Moynihan, and nominated in 1981 by a Republican president, Ronald Reagan.
He was a conservative-minded jurist. As a lawyer, he had helped successfully defend John N. Mitchell against conspiracy and perjury charges in the Watergate scandal, and he later supported Reagan's ultimately doomed nomination of Robert H. Bork to the Supreme Court.
But Judge Sprizzo also had an independent streak. Three years into his tenure, he infuriated the Reagan Justice Department when he refused to allow the extradition to Britain of Joseph Doherty, an Irish Republican Army member who had killed a British soldier and fled to the United States.
Judge Sprizzo reasoned that the killing was a political act, not a criminal one, thus making the killer exempt from extradition. A top Justice official called the ruling outrageous, saying the judge had made the US legal system complicit in terrorism. The ruling and its subsequent contretemps led to a rewriting of US extradition laws and Doherty's eventual deportation.
An equally contentious decision was made in a case involving two abortion protesters who had repeatedly obstructed the entrance of a women's medical clinic in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. The two men were arrested in 1995, and Judge Sprizzo issued a permanent injunction against them.
But when they were arrested again in 1996 and the US attorney's office asked him to find the two men in contempt of the order, he refused. Instead he exonerated the men, saying they had acted out of religious conviction. After abortion clinic bombings in Atlanta and Tulsa, Okla., the decision was briefly front and center in the abortion-rights debate.
John Emilio Sprizzo was born in Brooklyn. He graduated from St. John's University in Queens and earned a law degree there.
As a prosecutor, he rose to assistant chief of the criminal division in the US attorney's office for the Southern District. He later taught at Fordham University Law School and went into private practice.
Judge Sprizzo leaves his wife, Maria, a brother, two daughters, a son, and two grandchildren.
Joseph D. Pizzurro, who worked with Judge Sprizzo at Curtis, Mallet-Prevost in the 1970s and is now the firm's managing partner, called the judge a thoughtful teacher who "did not suffer fools gladly."
Judge Sprizzo displayed his temper in a courtroom confrontation in 1989, when he dismissed charges against 7 of 14 defendants in a drug conspiracy case and then berated the prosecutors, saying their preparation had been lazy and thoughtless.
"Don't lay it at my doorstep. I think I am right on the law," he told them. "But even if I am wrong on the law, if they are walking out of here, it is because you people were not competent enough to put an extra charge in your indictment. Sit down." 