By Robert Barnes and Michael A. Fletcher
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, September 21, 2007; A03

Judge Michael B. Mukasey clearly believed that the defendant did not have a case. He dismissed her assertion that the New York City Police Department fired her because she had accused a more senior officer of rape, without allowing a jury to hear the case. But a higher court disagreed and told the judge to hold a trial.

There, the jury found for Karen Sorlucco, and ordered the police department to pay her nearly $265,000. But again Mukasey disagreed, making a rare decision to overturn the jury's verdict, partly because he believed that the victim had committed perjury. "It would be grossly unjust for the jury verdict to stand," the judge said.

And, again, a higher court disagreed: "The trial court overstepped its bounds, and usurped the jury's function of judging credibility." It ordered Mukasey to enter judgment in Sorlucco's favor.

The case, finally settled in 1992, fairly early in Mukasey's career on the bench, showed a judge insistent on doing what he felt the law compelled, even when a jury and a higher court disagreed. "It's difficult whenever a judge takes away a jury verdict, but he was doing his job as he saw it," said Minna J. Kotkin, a professor at Brooklyn Law School, whose legal clinic handled Sorlucco's appeal. She added, "I don't think civil rights has been his first love."

Many lawyers who have practiced before Mukasey, 66, describe him as conservative but not doctrinaire, and fair. The long judicial record created by Mukasey's 18 years as judge on the U. S. District Court for the Southern District of New York included thousands of cases that ranged from high-profile terrorism trials to lengthy insurance battles over liability in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the twin towers, and a case in which a jury awarded $100 to a woman who said boxer Mike Tyson grabbed her buttocks.

His generally conservative demeanor on the bench and his self-confidence seem particularly pronounced in his handling of the complex trial of Omar Abdel Rahman, the "blind sheik," after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. After a long Rahman complaint at sentencing, he said: "You should be assured that there is no shortage of will in this country to deal with the threat of violence from any source. If you look at the record of even the relatively recent past -- the last 50 years of this country -- you will find that this country has faced militant fascism, and prevailed; it faced militant communism, and prevailed."

Mukasey also told Rahman: "The one thing that the sentence in this case will certainly assure to the citizens of this city and of this country, who deserve it, is that you and the others who are being sentenced here will never be in a position to do again what the evidence showed overwhelmingly that you did in this case."

While many commentators saw that trial, and Mukasey's handling of another case involving terrorist Jose Padilla, as models of jurisprudence in handling terrorism suspects, Mukasey came away from his experience deeply skeptical that the current criminal justice system is up to that relatively new task. He has since suggested that a separate national court might be needed for such cases.

"Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, is said to have told his American captors that he wanted a lawyer and would see them in court," Mukasey wrote last month. "If the Supreme Court rules . . . that foreigners in U.S. custody enjoy the protection of our Constitution regardless of the place or circumstances of their apprehension, this bold joke could become a reality." His statement matched the Bush administration's view.

In another op-ed column, Mukasey said he agrees with the proposition that government "is entitled, at least in the first instance, to receive from its citizens the benefit of the doubt." But while Mukasey ruled that he supported the administration's detention of Padilla as an "enemy combatant," he showed independence by ruling over the administration's objections that Padilla had the right to an attorney.

In a later case, Mukasey also ruled against a government bid to administer drugs to Susan Lindauer, a mentally unstable woman who had been charged as an agent of Iraq, to be able to try her in court.

Roland Thau, a federal public defender in Manhattan who has appeared before Mukasey, said: "He gave you a very good trial. He is very sharp, very focused. It was interesting to argue before him because he was interested in ideas and language."

Scott Horton, a former partner at Mukasey's law firm of Patterson Belknap Webb & Taylor who specializes in human rights law, wrote on his blog at Harper's Web site that "civil libertarians will find no shortage of things to dislike about Michael Mukasey." Nonetheless, Horton enthusiastically endorsed Mukasey's nomination, calling him "not just a prominent judge, he is a judicious personality."

Despite Mukasey's conservatism, liberal advocacy and civil rights groups have signaled tentative support for the confirmation of the now-retired judge. "It's premature to endorse his confirmation," said Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. "Early reports have been encouraging."

Henderson said he is concerned about Mukasey's past endorsement of the Bush administration's detention of immigrants as "material witnesses" to investigations into terrorism. "When it comes to his support of the mass roundup and detention of Arab, South Asian and Muslim men after 9/11, there are some real questions that can't be ignored," Henderson said.

Judith E. Schaeffer, legal director for the liberal People for the American Way, said her organization is not examining Mukasey's judicial opinions as much as his ties to Bush administration officials. "He's not being proposed for the Supreme Court or even the circuit court," she said. "Whether or not he is a political crony, whether he can be independent, is what we're looking at."

There are no statistics to show if Mukasey has been overturned more often than other judges, but Mukasey has had his share of important and colorful cases.

In 2004, he dismissed a class-action suit accusing an Italian insurance company of not paying benefits to victims of the Holocaust, saying the lawsuits were preempted by a Supreme Court decision. He decided copyright suits concerning the movie "Driving Miss Daisy" and concerning a toy bank that sounded like a toilet flushing when coins were inserted.

He overturned a Motion Picture Association of America ban on the dispatch of copies of movies to voters in the annual Academy Awards. He presided over trials of mob bosses and dirty cops, and showed a streak of judicial wit in a case pitting Coors Brewing Co. against Anheuser-Busch over what Coors called unfair advertising.

Though he sided with Anheuser-Busch, he declined to get involved in their fight over whether pasteurization affects the taste of beer. "De gustibus cerevesiae non scit lex," he wrote. Loosely translated from the Latin, it means "concerning the taste of beer law knows nothing."

Court records show that Mukasey could be biting when confronted with an argument he did not support. In 1996, Shilon Rogers filed a motion with Mukasey to suppress evidence, including a kilogram of cocaine, found when New York police searched her after stopping a cab in which she and a friend were riding in an isolated area of Harlem.

Police officers said they stopped the taxi because the driver flashed his headlights at them, signaling that he was in danger. Rogers argued that the stop resulted from racial profiling. "There is no basis in the record for these innuendos," Mukasey wrote. "They are odious, and they are rejected."

In the Sorlucco discrimination case in which he was twice reversed on appeal, Mukasey saw differently on practically every aspect of the case. He found that no "reasonable jury" could have deduced discrimination from the evidence presented. What he saw as perjury, the appeals court found to be "conflicting testimony."

Mukasey said the police department behaved properly. The appeals court wrote that it "tragically failed to show any sensitivity to the physical trauma and the resulting psychological manifestations commonly experienced by rape victims."

Researcher Madonna Lebling and Information Resources Director Lucy Shackelford contributed to this article.