NEW YORK — The detectives crouched low, guns in hand, sweeping the crumbling apartments, moving cautiously from room to room, barking at the two prosecutors to stay back, to watch out.
The lawyers were children of the city, raised in ethnic neighborhoods by families of modest means. But the poverty here in central Harlem startled them. Some of the abandoned buildings served as shooting galleries, places where drug addicts congregated. The air was rank, the threat of violence palpable.
In 1982, three years after leaving the comfort of Yale Law School, Sonia Sotomayor was gathering evidence for her first murder trial. She was helping to prosecute Richard Maddicks, dubbed the "Tarzan Burglar" because he used a rope to swing from rooftops into the windows of apartment buildings, sometimes shooting those he found inside.
"It really symbolizes what was going on in New York at the time -- a city engulfed in violence," said Hugh H. Mo, the senior prosecutor with Sotomayor that day. "Life was cheap then."
Though her critics portray the Supreme Court nominee as a liberal activist, her colleagues and legal opponents in the early 1980s draw a picture of her as a zealous prosecutor whose experiences combating crime have made her, according to experts who have studied her legal decisions, something of a law-and-order judge, especially when it comes to police searches and the use of evidence.
In two major rulings after she joined the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York in 1998, she held that evidence could be used to convict a defendant even though police had violated his rights in seizing it. Sotomayor said that because the police and prosecutors acted "in good faith," the evidence need not be thrown out.
In 1999, Sotomayor upheld the crack cocaine conviction of a New York man despite what she called a "mistaken arrest." Last year, Sotomayor spoke for a 2-1 majority that upheld a man's child pornography conviction, even though she agreed an FBI agent did not have probable cause to search his computer.
"I think her experience as a prosecutor balances out her liberal tendencies," said New York University law professor Kenji Yoshino.
But when punishment is at issue, she has joined liberal opinions to limit prison terms in drug cases.
