Joseph Baldi was convicted in 1975 of the murder of Deborah Januszko, a 15-year-old girl who was stabbed to death in Queens in June 1972. Three months before, he had been released from Creedmoor State Hospital, where he had been sent after being found incompetent to stand trial for trying to shoot a police officer. The hospital let him go in February 1972 without notice to the district attorney or the court, according to the New York Court of Appeals.
After his arrest in the Januszko case he confessed, in interviews arranged by his own lawyer, to three other murders and ten assaults on women. A judge later barred those statements from being used against him, and the appellate opinions do not say what became of the three murder charges brought on them. In the cases that were tried, a jury convicted him of the attempted murder of the officer, and a judge, sitting without a jury, rejected his insanity defense and found him guilty of murdering Deborah Januszko. His appeal from those verdicts became People v. Baldi, the 1981 decision in which the Court of Appeals set New York's standard for judging whether a defendant's lawyer was effective. The same court applied that standard again in 1998 and extended it in 2004.
The record of Baldi's life before 1971 in the published opinions is brief. They do not give his date or place of birth, his schooling or his family. What they do record begins in September 1971, in Queens.
On September 5, 1971, police answered a complaint about a prowler. When an officer, John Hamberger, asked a man for identification, the man drew a pistol, pointed it at the officer and pulled the trigger. The gun misfired, and the officers overpowered him. The man was Joseph Baldi.
The officers found live ammunition in the pistol and in his jacket. His wallet held a neighbor's driver's license, car registration and Social Security card, and a handbag stolen from the neighbor that night was later found in a trash can. Those facts became the basis of the charges in what the courts later called the first case: the attempted murder of a police officer, burglary in the second degree and felonious possession of a weapon. A grand jury indicted him in December 1971.
He did not stand trial then. After an examination at Kings County Hospital, Baldi was found incompetent to stand trial. He was sent first to Mid-Hudson State Hospital and then to Creedmoor State Hospital.
In February 1972 Creedmoor released him. The Court of Appeals, setting out the history in 1981, said the release was made without notice to the district attorney or to the court. The indictment for trying to kill a police officer was still pending, and a lawyer represented him on it.
Deborah Januszko was 15 years old. She was stabbed to death in Queens on June 17, 1972. The Court of Appeals opinion gives little more about her life than her name and her age.
Three days after the killing, on June 20, a detective named Palmer saw Baldi in the neighborhood. Asked what he was doing there, Baldi said that he went to a trade school nearby.
Shortly after midnight, at about 12:15 a.m. on June 21, Detective Palmer found Baldi in the hallway of his building and asked him to come in for questioning. Baldi brought up the earlier case himself. He told the detective about the charge involving the police officer and said that he had been sent to Creedmoor. The Court of Appeals noted that Palmer did not follow up on this and did not ask Baldi whether he had a lawyer on that charge. The point mattered years later.
With Baldi's consent, officers went into his apartment, where they found knives. Baldi then went to the station house. He was given the Miranda warnings, and another detective, Lamardo, questioned him. In the course of the questioning he confessed to killing Deborah Januszko.
What happened next shaped both trials and the appeal. At the station house, Baldi went into what the Court of Appeals described as a trance-like state and acted out the killing three times in pantomime. Each time, he collapsed afterward. At about 5:30 that morning, the police took him to the Januszko home, and there he acted out the crime again, this time without collapsing.
He was charged with her murder. On June 22, 1972, the court assigned Sidney Sparrow to defend him. Sparrow, by the account of the Court of Appeals, had been practicing law for about 40 years.
A grand jury indicted Baldi for the Januszko murder on July 8, 1972.
In July 1972, Sparrow arranged for his client to be questioned again, this time with Sparrow present, together with detectives and two psychiatrists. There were two sessions, on July 7 and July 14. At the first, Baldi again fell into a trance-like state. At the second, a psychiatrist hypnotized him, and he described the events as things in the past.
In those two sessions he confessed to the Januszko killing, to three other murders and to ten assaults on women. Sparrow later said that he had agreed to the interviews on the understanding that nothing his client said would be used against him. The prosecutor disputed that there had been any such understanding.
On July 18, 1972, a grand jury indicted Baldi for the three other murders he had described. The appellate opinions do not name the three victims, and they do not record what became of that indictment.
After his arrest in June 1972, Baldi was held at Kings County Hospital for examination. In all, three examinations after his arrest found him competent to stand trial. No case went to trial, however, until late 1974, more than two years after the Januszko killing.
Before the murder trial, the court held a Huntley hearing, New York's pretrial hearing on whether a defendant's statements to the police may be used as evidence. Sparrow testified at it.
The hearing judge ruled that Baldi's June 21 confession to the Januszko killing was voluntary and could be used. The judge suppressed the statements of July 7 and July 14, finding that using them would violate Baldi's rights given the understanding under which they were made, though the judge did not expressly find that an agreement existed. The prosecution accepted that the July statements were out, and they were not offered at trial. The confessions to three other murders and ten assaults were therefore never tested as evidence in any case that reached the appellate courts.
The first case to be tried was the 1971 attempt on Officer Hamberger. It went before a jury in October 1974. Baldi entered pleas of not guilty and not guilty by reason of insanity.
The defense ran two lines at once. It argued that Baldi had not done what the officers said, and it argued in the alternative that he was insane, a schizophrenic with two or more personalities. Baldi testified and denied the events.
Sparrow also took the witness stand. He testified about the July 1972 interviews, including the confessions Baldi had made in them, and about his client's condition on June 22, 1972. In his closing argument he pointed to weaknesses in the prosecution's case and pressed the insanity claim. He did not vouch for Baldi's truthfulness.
The jury convicted Baldi of attempted murder of a police officer, burglary in the second degree and felonious possession of a weapon. He received consecutive sentences, and judgment was entered on November 24, 1974.
The Januszko trial began in late November 1974 before a judge without a jury. This time Baldi relied on a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. He again took the stand and denied the killing.
Sparrow testified once more, but only about Baldi's demeanor on June 22 and during the July interviews. On cross-examination he said that Baldi had confessed to other murders, while adding that Baldi had recalled them only after being told about them.
The defense called a psychiatrist, Dr. Harry La Burt, to support the insanity claim. The prosecution's psychiatrist was Dr. Daniel Schwartz. Other experts, not named in the opinion, also testified.
The judge rejected the insanity defense and found Baldi guilty of murder in the second degree. Judgment was entered on January 16, 1975, with an indeterminate sentence of 25 years to life.
Baldi appealed both judgments to the Appellate Division, Second Department. He argued that the prosecution had not proven his sanity beyond a reasonable doubt, and he attacked his lawyer's work.
The court rejected the sanity argument. But a majority held, as a matter of law, that he had been denied the effective assistance of counsel, and it reversed both convictions. The prosecution appealed to the Court of Appeals.
The Court of Appeals decided the case on October 29, 1981. Chief Judge Cooke wrote the opinion, and Judges Jasen, Gabrielli, Jones, Wachtler, Fuchsberg and Meyer concurred. The court reversed the Appellate Division.
Baldi's challenge to his lawyer had five parts: that Sparrow did not pursue actual innocence at the first trial; that he mishandled the expert witnesses; that he testified at both trials and at the Huntley hearing and argued poorly in summation; that he set up the July 1972 interviews; and that he did too little to suppress the June 21 confession.
The court took them in turn. Given the evidence, it said, a claim of innocence was weak, and a lawyer could reasonably choose to rely on insanity; Sparrow had in any case argued innocence to the jury. His handling of the experts was not unreasonable: he did not contradict his own witness and he cross-examined the prosecution's psychiatrist at length. His own testimony served a proper purpose, because it supported the insanity defense. A footnote noted that a lawyer testifying for his own client raises a question under the ethics rules, but the court found no ineffectiveness as a matter of law on that ground.
The July interviews were, in the court's words, the "more serious" question. The court said a written agreement with the prosecutor would have been the better course. But the statements had been suppressed and never used, so the complaint was, as the court put it, "a challenge to his effectiveness in the abstract."
Pulling these together, the court held that a well-grounded but unsuccessful defense is not ineffective assistance. Its central sentence, quoted by the same court in 1998, reads: "So long as the evidence, the law, and the circumstances of a particular case, viewed in totality and as of the time of the representation, reveal that the attorney provided meaningful representation, the constitutional requirement will have been met." Courts, it warned, must avoid "confusing true ineffectiveness with mere losing tactics and according undue significance to retrospective analysis."
One issue remained open. Baldi argued for the first time in the Court of Appeals that his June 21, 1972 confession should have been suppressed because he already had a lawyer on the pending attempted-murder charge, and he had mentioned that charge to Detective Palmer before he was questioned. Citing its decision in People v. Bartolomeo, the court said that a waiver of the right to counsel made without one's lawyer present may not be valid.
Because the question turned on facts no court had yet examined, the Court of Appeals sent the case back to the Appellate Division to review the facts and, if needed, to order a further suppression hearing on the murder charge. If suppression were denied and no new trial was required on other grounds, a new judgment was to be entered so that the ruling could itself be appealed. The published opinions of that time do not record how the remitted question was decided.
The decision outlived the case. In People v. Benevento, in 1998, the Court of Appeals called it "the well settled Baldi test." In People v. Stultz, in 2004, it wrote that in Baldi "we set the standard for claimed ineffective assistance of trial counsel." The court explained there that Baldi had replaced the older "farce or mockery" test, that it rested partly on the New York State Constitution, and that New York had kept it rather than adopt the federal test announced three years later in Strickland v. Washington. Under the Baldi standard, the court said, a defendant need not fully meet Strickland's prejudice requirement. In Stultz the court extended the same standard to claims against appellate lawyers.
The three other murders. Baldi confessed to three other killings in the July 1972 interviews and was indicted for them on July 18, 1972. Those statements were suppressed, and the appellate opinions do not name the victims or report any trial, plea or dismissal on that indictment. The killings are his only by his own suppressed account.
The ten assaults. The same interviews included confessions to ten assaults on women. No charge on them appears in the appellate record.
The understanding with the prosecutor. Sparrow said that the July interviews were held on the understanding that nothing said would be used against Baldi; the prosecutor disputed it. The hearing judge suppressed the statements without expressly finding that any agreement existed.
The mental illness. Baldi was found incompetent to stand trial in 1971 and competent three times after June 1972. The defense presented him as a schizophrenic with more than one personality; the trial judge in the murder case, and the jury in the first case, rejected the insanity defense, and the Appellate Division upheld the finding that his sanity had been proven.
The confession of June 21, 1972. Whether it should have been suppressed because he already had a lawyer on the pending charge was left open by the Court of Appeals in 1981.
September 5, 1971: Baldi points a pistol at Officer John Hamberger in Queens and pulls the trigger; the gun misfires and he is arrested.
December 1971: Indicted for attempted murder of a police officer, burglary and weapon possession; found incompetent to stand trial after an examination at Kings County Hospital; sent to Mid-Hudson State Hospital, then Creedmoor State Hospital.
February 1972: Released from Creedmoor without notice to the district attorney or the court.
June 17, 1972: Deborah Januszko, 15, is stabbed to death in Queens.
June 20, 1972: Detective Palmer sees Baldi in the neighborhood.
June 21, 1972: Questioned after midnight; confesses to the Januszko killing; acts it out at the station house and at the Januszko home; charged.
June 22, 1972: Sidney Sparrow assigned as his lawyer.
July 7 and 14, 1972: Interviews with his lawyer, detectives and two psychiatrists; he confesses to three other murders and ten assaults on women.
July 8, 1972: Indicted for the Januszko murder.
July 18, 1972: Indicted for three other murders.
October 1974: Jury trial on the 1971 charges; convicted of attempted murder of a police officer, burglary and weapon possession.
November 1974: Huntley hearing; the June 21 confession is admitted and the July statements are suppressed.
November 24, 1974: Judgment entered in the attempted-murder case; consecutive sentences.
Late November to December 1974: Nonjury murder trial; insanity defense rejected; found guilty of murder in the second degree.
January 16, 1975: Judgment entered; sentenced to 25 years to life.
Date not given in the 1981 opinion: The Appellate Division, Second Department, reverses both convictions for ineffective assistance of counsel.
October 29, 1981: The Court of Appeals reverses the Appellate Division in People v. Baldi and sends back the right-to-counsel question.
June 11, 1998: People v. Benevento applies "the well settled Baldi test."
May 4, 2004: People v. Stultz extends the Baldi standard to appellate counsel.