Spitzer To Appeal Decision on Phillips Parole Hearing

The office of the New York attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, said yesterday he is planning to appeal a State Supreme Court decision granting a new parole board hearing to a former police officer who is 74 and suffering from prostate cancer.

Mr. Spitzer's decision marks another chapter in the dramatic career of the former officer, William Phillips, who has served three decades in maximum-security facilities.

Phillips, who was convicted of murdering a prostitute and her pimp in the early 1970s, later lost several appeals, including one that went to the U.S. Supreme Court. Phillips also played a primary role as a corrupt cop turned informant who incriminated mobsters and fellow police officers for the Knapp Commission, which ultimately led to a series of indictments and reforms within the New York Police Department.

Serving a 25-years-to-life sentence, Phillips has earned various academic degrees and certificates for his work as a jailhouse lawyer and prison law clerk, and has even been offered a job teaching a law course in a four-year college in upstate New York, pending his release. However, he has been denied parole three times.

In an 18-page decision issued last month against the state's Division of Parole, State Supreme Court Justice Alice Schlesinger argued that the parole board had been "unlawful" and "arbitrary and capricious" in their decision to deny Phillips parole. She ordered an immediate hearing with new parole commissioners. The new parole hearing, if granted over Mr. Spitzer's appeal, would save Phillips more than half a year until his next hearing, slated for the fall.

Attorneys for Phillips argued that Mr. Spitzer was abusing the powers and finances of the attorney general's office for "legal tactics and maneuvering" for a "moot" cause.

"This is disgraceful and disheartening," Phillips's pro bono attorney, Daniel Perez, of the law firm Kuby & Perez, said of Mr. Spitzer's decision to appeal. "What we have here is legal manipulation of the worst kind, at the expense of a 74-year-old man."

"You have to wonder, what's the point of rehabilitation if the system is rigged in such a way that it doesn't allow it?" Mr. Perez asked.

A spokesman for the attorney general, Brad Maione, declined to comment on the appeal, citing ongoing litigation.