Charles Kaufman (judge)

Charles Kaufman (1920–2004) was a judge for the Third Circuit Court of Michigan, with jurisdiction over Southeast Michigan and its largest city, Detroit, MI.

Born in 1920, Kaufman served as a navigator for the Army Air Force during World War II. He became a POW (prisoner of war) in Japanese prison camp when his plane was shot down after 27 missions.

After the war, Kaufman graduated from Wayne State University Law School in 1948, and joined his father's firm before winning the election for Common Pleas Court Judge in 1959, and Wayne County Third Circuit Court of Michigan in 1964 where he served for 30 years. He also was a candidate for the First District of the Michigan Court of Appeals in 1968 and 1982, and a Michigan State Supreme Court candidate in 1976.

During his tenure as Third Circuit Court, Kaufman was known for leniency towards first time offenders. In 1977, when a 17-year-old African American male, Greg Mathis, was arrested on a concealed-weapons charge, Kaufman handed a sentence of probation, provided that Mathis enrolled and passed a G.E.D. course in six months. Mathis turned away from gang behavior, and in 1994, he went on to become the youngest judge elected to the 36th District Court in Detroit, eventually becoming a popular television personality as Judge Mathis.

Kaufman is the judge who sentenced former Chrysler plant superintendent Ronald Ebens and his stepson Michael Nitz on March 16, 1983 to three years probation and $3,780 in fines and court costs after they were convicted of manslaughter for the killing of Vincent Chin. Asian American advocacy groups were outraged. Ebens had gone with Nitz to hunt down Chin and the only other Asian in his group of four friends and had Nitz hold Chin down as Ebens used a baseball bat to viciously beat Chin in the head. Though Ebens was still employed by Chrysler at the time of the attack, the act was seen as the hate crime of a laid-off American autoworker taking out his frustration about the Japanese automobile industry on an innocent person.

...
Wikipedia