Prosecutors and defense attorneys sparred Monday on how much weight should be given to the recently-confessed views on race of a former judge who convicted a white man for murdering a black man 14 years ago.
Donald Kagan is seeking to set aside a 1999 second-degree murder conviction based on revelations from the trial court judge, Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Frank Barbaro, who, as a white man, now says his work in the civil rights movement and his resulting sympathies tainted the guilty verdict he imposed after a bench trial.
