Burton B. Roberts

Legal career Starting in 1949, he began his legal career as an assistant prosecutor to Frank Hogan the New York County District Attorney, which was where he started using his voice, described as being "a few decibels below the roar of a jet engine", prosecuting petty criminals and corrupt politicians alike. In 1966 he was lured away from Manhattan to become the chief assistant to Bronx County District Attorney Isidore Dollinger, and became acting district attorney in 1967 when Dollinger ran for a judicial seat. The Happy Land fire trial was a model for the way he ran his courtroom, allowing "No histrionics. No emotion run amok." He would feel free to interrupt any lawyer or witness who strayed off the topic or rambled. He was ultimately chosen as the administrative judge in charge of criminal and civil trial courts in the county, serving in that role for more than a decade before his retirement from the bench in 1998. In the 1990 film adaptation of the book starring Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis and Melanie Griffith, the role of the judge was renamed to Leonard White and was played by Morgan Freeman,

Upon retirement, he entered private practice with the politically connected firm of Fischbein Badillo Wagner Harding. He said he worked for "a very fine firm with very fine people", but regretted not serving as a judge, saying "I enjoyed the other life more. I always felt I could do things for more people in public life". One of the first cases he took on in private practice involved defending one of the police officers charged in the shooting death of Amadou Diallo, in which he was able to convince the judge to change the venue of the case to Albany, arguing that his client could not get a fair trial in the Bronx.

Death Roberts died of respiratory failure at the age of 88 on October 24, 2010, at the Hebrew Home for the Aged in Riverdale, the Bronx where he had resided for the year before his death. He was survived by his wife, the former Gerhild Hammer, whom he married in 1982 after decades of bachelorhood.