The reason was that Rosenberg never made it to law school. A street-tough eighth-grade dropout who was found guilty of killing two New York City policemen in 1963, he had come to court to appeal his first-degree murder conviction. "I seen a few guys go to the chair, so I knew they weren't playing games," says Rosenberg. "I started studying law in the death house."
His appeal failed, but Rosenberg's sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 1965. By then the jailhouse lawyer had completed a correspondence course in criminal justice from Boston University and was working toward a pair of mail-order law degrees from Chicago's Blackstone College.
Although his murder conviction made him ineligible for the bar, Rosenberg began accumulating a 250-volume library in his jail cell. In 1972, he says, when he appeared at a hearing in behalf of a fellow lifer, he became the first unlicensed attorney to represent a client in a New York courtroom. Rosenberg concedes that most of his legal battles have been on paper ("writs, appeals, things like that") but claims he has helped more than 50 cons win their freedom.
He has been less successful in his own behalf and is currently confined to the federal prison in Manhattan. But Rosenberg's exertions have not gone unnoticed. A movie biography is scheduled to go before the cameras this summer, and Rosenberg, 41, recently became engaged to Irene Donohue, a 25-year-old secretary he met at a prison picnic outside the walls. True to form, he is suing for the right to be married behind bars.
The son of novelty company owners, Rosenberg began his odyssey of crime in childhood. "When I was a kid in Brooklyn, I ran with gangs," he says. "I was in trouble with the law from the age of 13, but they couldn't make nothin' stick. I was never convicted." Then, at 19, after acquiring a dishonorable discharge from the Army, plus a teenage bride (who divorced him in 1959) and a baby daughter, he was sentenced to five years in prison for robbery. Within six months of his release on parole, he was charged with gunning down the two cops during a tobacco company hold-up. Though he still protests his innocence, eight witnesses identified Rosenberg as the triggerman.
After three years at New York's Sing Sing prison, Rosenberg was transferred to Attica. He negotiated for fellow prisoners during the 1971 riot that claimed 43 lives, then suffered a gunshot wound in the knee and several broken ribs when state troopers stormed the prison. "I was in the box [solitary] for 11 months," he claims. Rosenberg now blames police and prison doctors ("they're mutts") for a variety of ailments, including persistent headaches and a permanently damaged right eye. "I've studied medicine too," he says cheerfully. "I had to. I study law to get out of jail, and I study medicine to stay alive."
Lately Rosenberg has been giving law enforcement officials some headaches of their own. Last year he traveled to Albany—in handcuffs—to lobby the state legislature for prison reform. At Green Haven, a state maximum security facility, he helped lead a four-day inmate strike, and he issuing prison authorities for tampering with his mail. Meanwhile he has filed a $9 million suit against former New York City Special Prosecutor Maurice Nadjari, and is pressing a $20 million suit against the FBI on behalf of reputed Mafia Godfather Carmine Galante.
"Jerry has a quick, alert, shrewd mind, and he can talk to his clients in terms no one else would understand," says radical lawyer William Kunstler, who met Rosenberg during the Attica negotiations. Though Rosenberg is pessimistic on his chances for parole ("The prison people hate me"), his dream is to settle in California and practice law. The $5,000 he says he received from the film company for his life story could be his stake—but a recent state law allows criminals to be sued for compensation by their victims' families. "You put somebody in jail and you take his money too?" Rosenberg says indignantly. "I'm going to attack that law as soon as it's used."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
