John Goff

John William Goff (January 1 1848 - November 9 1924) was an Irish-born lawyer and judge also noted for his support of Fenian rebel movements.

Born in County Wexford, Goff emigrated with his family to the United States while still a child. The family settled in New York, where, although his schooling was extremely limited, Goff was eventually able to take night classes at Cooper Union and acquire a basic education. In 1865 he took a job as a junior clerk in an attorney's office and, after more years of study, was admitted to the New York bar.

Goff was a committed Irish nationalist and in 1875 he played a prominent part in arranging for the rescue of six Fenian rebels imprisoned in a British penal colony in Western Australia. The seaborne expedition that successfully evaded Royal Navy patrols, involving the New Bedford whaler "Catalpa", was popularly known as 'Goff's Irish Rescue Party'.

In 1888 Goff became Assistant District Attorney for the city of New York and shortly afterwards he became involved with work for the Society for the Prevention of Crime. There he made the acquaintance of the reforming clergyman Charles Parkhurst, and as a result became prominent among the ranks of those critical of vice and police corruption in Manhattan. When Republican boss Thomas Platt, seeking political advantage over his enemies at Tammany Hall, arranged for the establishment of the Lexow Committee to investigate corruption in the Police Department (NYPD), Goff was named chief counsel.

In more than eight months of work for the Committee - a period notable for his interrogations of corrupt police commissioner John McClave, the notoriously brutal Alexander Williams and Superintendent Thomas Byrnes, the renowned former head of the city's Detective Bureau - Goff made his name. He was subsequently elected Recorder and in 1906 rose to become a judge.

In the course of his career on the New York bench, Goff presided over the first trial of Charles Becker, a police lieutenant charged with arranging the murder of a gambler named Herman Rosenthal. The trial, held in October 1912, was notable for the extreme speed at which Goff ran the proceedings, both the prosecution and the defence being heard in less than two weeks. Becker was found guilty, but the verdict was later reversed on appeal on the grounds that Goff had heavily favoured the prosecution. The verdict of the Court of Appeals, one of the most strongly worded in New York's history, went 6 to 1 against Goff and charged that 'haste seemed to become the essence of the trial'. Goff was also reprimanded for repeatedly denying the defence's requests for adjournments.

In retirement, John Goff lived on a farm in upstate New York where he raised fancy herons. He was never a learned man - his politely-worded entry in the Dictionary of American Biography admits that 'he could never be described as a scholar' - but was widely regarded, among his contemporaries, as the great terror of the New York bar. The criminal lawyer Newman Levy described him as 'the cruelest, most sadistic judge we have had in New York this century', and according to Andy Logan, the chronicler of the Becker case, 'distinguished members of the bar at the height of their careers confessed to waking up in their beds in a cold sweat, having heard in nightmares the sound of that low, sibilant voice saying "Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, "guilty"!" - a verdict he pronounced, it seemed to them, with joy.'

References

Books

* Logan, Andy. Against the Evidence: The Becker-Rosenthal Affair. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 1970.
* Stevens, Peter F. The Voyage of the Catalpa: A Perilous Journey and SIx Irish Rebels' Flight To Freedom. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers. 2002.
* Dictionary of American Biography, volume 7.

Articles

"Mr McClave's Ordeal Over". (May 25, 1894). New York Times, p.1."Williams Denies All". (December 27, 1894). New York Times, p.1."Williams At The Wall". (December 28, 1894). New York Times, p.1.