Judging Madoff

But that is the story of Denny Chin ’75, who rose from the classrooms of New York’s public schools to a seat on the federal court. As a judge for the Southern District of New York, Chin has presided over a number of high-profile cases and is currently adjudicating the trial of Bernard Madoff. On March 12, in Chin’s courtroom, Madoff pleaded guilty to charges stemming from his operation of a $65 billion decades-long Ponzi scheme. Chin is scheduled to sentence Madoff on June 16.

A psychology concentrator at the University, Chin was also a managing editor of The Daily Princetonian’s 98th Managing Board. Several colleagues from his days at the ‘Prince’ said his penchant for justice was evident early on.

“I’m not at all surprised that he is a federal judge,” Joyce Rechtschaffen ’75, a former executive editor of the ‘Prince,’ said in an e-mail. “During the often heated debates that sometimes mark editorial board meetings at The Daily Princetonian, Denny always worked to find common ground.”

Others said they remember him from college as a warm and sometimes subdued person who was always easy to get along with.

“There was no one who didn’t like Denny,” said Andy Pollack ’75, another former executive editor who is now a writer for The New York Times. “He was always approachable, always friendly and always did his job well.”

That approachability and dedication won him respect from some unlikely people. As managing editor, Chin focused mainly on newspaper layout and interacted frequently with the paper’s flat-topped, cigar-chomping production manager Larry Dupraz.

Former ‘Prince’ chairman Joel Goldstein ’75 said that, though Dupraz “would always be telling us how terrible we were,” he “was secretly fond of all of us.”

That was especially true for Chin, Goldstein said. “When I told him that Denny was going to be … in charge of the press operation, Larry was absolutely thrilled.”

Goldstein also noted Chin’s impressive ability to seek common ground when dealing with a wide variety of personalities.

“People who didn’t work well with each other had no problem working with Denny,” he said.

Chin was also involved with the Asian American Students Association while he was at Princeton, and before graduating magna cum laude, he met his future wife, Kathy Hirata ’75.

Both Denny and Kathy Chin declined to comment for this article.

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After graduating from Fordham Law School, where he was managing editor of the Fordham Law Review and founded the university’s first Asian American Law Students Association, Chin clerked for a judge in the same court where he currently serves.

“In [that] courtroom, I saw justice in action,” Chin told the University’s Alumni Association in 2007. “I knew then that I had made the right decision to go into the law. I knew also that I wanted to come back someday to be a judge myself.”

That chance presented itself in September 1994, when then-President Bill Clinton nominated Chin to the Southern District Court of New York. He became the first Asian-American district court judge outside California and Hawaii.

As a judge, Chin has tackled many controversial issues. In addition to the Madoff case, Chin denied the Fox News Channel an injunction against Al Franken for using the phrase “fair and balanced” in his book’s title. In 2006, he overturned a New York law that increased the state’s power to track sex offenders. In 2007, he presided over the trial of Texas billionaire Oscar Wyatt, who was convicted of complying with former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s demand for a surcharge on Iraqi oil when the U.N. Oil for Food program forbade it.

Thursday, July 24

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