LOCAL

Measles outbreak: Michael Sussman, the man who beat Rockland's ban

Peter D. Kramer
Poughkeepsie Journal
Attorney Michael Sussman speaks outside the Rockland County Courthouse after a hearing on the Rockland County state of emergency because of measles April 4, 2019.

One member of the Harvard Law Class of 1978 is an associate justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. Another is senior chairman at Goldman Sachs.  A third is a civil-rights attorney and father of seven who faced death threats credible enough that the FBI moved in.

The one portrayed by movie star Jon Bernthal was neither Stephen Breyer nor Lloyd Blankfein. It was Michael Sussman. 

Sussman, in recent years, has been at the center of several high-profile cases in Dutchess County.

Among them, he represented Rev. Robert Repenning, after the longtime local priest was removed from his post at Holy Trinity in Poughkeepsie because of the alleged severity of his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He represented former several Marlboro High School football players and their parents in a suit alleging abuse for the team's former coach.

More recently, in Rockland County Sussman successfully challenged County Executive Ed Day's emergency declaration amid the area’s measles outbreak, barring unvaccinated children from schools and other public places.

Of course, Sussman is accustomed to headline-grabbing topics.

Mention Sussman’s name in some quarters of Yonkers — where he won a landmark 1981 case that dragged on for decades and cost the city, HUD, and the state $400 million to integrate schools and housing  — and you might still get icy stares. Or a few choice words. Or worse.

Not that Sussman minds. What matters to the 65-year-old lawyer is what he sees in New York’s fourth-largest city, nearly 40 years that first court victory on behalf of the Yonkers NAACP.

“Progress is that when I go to Yonkers today and I go through East Yonkers there are many more people of color there who have been able to live and work there than before,” he said.

'Fighting the good fight' 

Sussman knows how to generate headlines, just as his uncle, Barry Sussman, knew how to write them as The Washington Post editor who oversaw the paper's Watergate coverage.

It’s a comparison Sussman makes, and one he likes. Watergate defined his uncle’s work, just as Sussman’s work in Yonkers — a case he took on at age 27 and stayed with for 26 years, until it was closed in 2007 — defined him as a lawyer and as a person. He calls it "fighting the good fight."

The desegregation case set off a powder keg in Yonkers, turned City Council meetings into blood sport and led federal judge Leonard B. Sand to levy crippling fines for the city's noncompliance, up to a million dollars a day.

During the case, Sussman says matter-of-factly, the threats were so real that "we had to have the FBI living with me for a period of time." 

That cauldron, during the age of Morton Downey Jr.'s inflammatory television show, informed Sussman's perspective and career. 

It was so dramatic, it found its way to the screen, David Simon's HBO miniseries "Show Me a Hero," with Bernthal, of "The Walking Dead" fame, playing Sussman.

Green Party candidate

Yonkers was first and foremost, but there have been other high-profile cases and causes.

Sussman has taken up environmental causes — the latest of which challenges the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's policy on greenhouse gas emissions from pipelines, tied to the New Market Project near upstate Otsego County.

That work, and the lifelong Democrat's disdain for what he called "the duopoly of corrupt practices," prompted his 2018 Green Party candidacy for New York attorney general, a race won by Democrat Letitia James.

(He was once a Chester town councilman and ran for Orange County executive as a Democrat in 2001, losing to Republican Edward Diana.)

Staying with a case for 26 years demonstrates a doggedness, and a degree of self-righteousness, that have also defined Sussman’s career, whether fighting racial segregation, representing families of black men killed by police, or, most recently, representing Green Meadow Waldorf parents in their challenge to Rockland County’s measles-focused ban on unvaccinated youth in public places.

Battling Ed Day's measles ban

The 30-day ban, announced by Day on March 26, ordered those younger than 18 who were unvaccinated to keep themselves home, and away from indoor public places, including malls, restaurants, and places of worship. Failure to do so would cost parents $500 and six months in jail.

Sussman challenged the order as a governmental over-reach, on behalf of parents at Chestnut Ridge's Green Meadow Waldorf School, not part of the Orthodox Jewish community where nearly all of the confirmed measles cases have been found. 

The government, he said, could order sick people to stay home, but it could not order otherwise healthy people to stay home — including his clients, many of whom choose not to vaccinate their children, in a close-knit community where no measles cases had been confirmed.

Sussman won two stays in that case, stymieing Day and prompting Day and Health Commissioner Dr. Patricia Schnabel Ruppert to pivot.

Day announced Tuesday that his ban, had been amended to a "Communicable Disease and Exposure Exclusion Order" requiring anyone with measles to stay home, and those exposed stay out of public spaces throughout the county. Those who do not comply face a $2,000-a-day fine.

In announcing the change in policy, the county announced there have been 186 confirmed measles cases since the outbreak began in October. Ruppert also said she is sure there have been more cases that the county cannot verify.

There are also eight confirmed recent cases in the Mount Kisco and Bedford area of northern Westchester.

An outbreak in Ocean and Passaic counties in New Jersey and in Brooklyn began when Rockland's did, last fall, when infected travelers from Israel, visiting for the high holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, spread the virus.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio declared a stringent public-health emergency requiring vaccinations in parts of Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Parents of New York City children who have not been vaccinated against measles filed suit this week to halt the order. They are represented by Manhattan-based attorney Robert Krakow, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Piermont's Patricia Finn.

But Brooklyn Judge Lawrence Knipel dismissed the suit on Thursday, saying the families hadn't documented their religious objections. He also came down forcefully on the side of vaccines.

"A fireman need not obtain the informed consent of the owner before extinguishing a house fire," Knipel wrote. "Vaccination is known to extinguish the fire of contagion."

Brooklyn roots

Michael Sussman’s voice has more than a trace of his Flatbush, Brooklyn, roots. His father was an accountant with an unused law degree, until he and his son formed a practice in 1986.

His voice also has traces of Hewlett, on the South Shore of Long Island, where he went to high school and served as president of the student council and pushed for student representation on the school board. He was also editor of the school paper, the Hewlett Bulletin.

"I realized you needed to consolidate power," he quips.

Sussman took a break from the University of Chicago to intern at the Democratic National Committee in 1973, the Watergate era, seeing his uncle in action. 

He transferred to Amherst College and worked on Jimmy Carter's 1976 presidential campaign. He learned about environmental issues, and earned his environmental bona fides, working with Ralph Nader and Mark Green, who would later become New York City's public advocate.

Then to Harvard Law, where he met Breyer and Blankfein.

The Supreme court justice offered no comment on his long-ago classmate. Blankfein, of Goldman, said that while he’s had no contact with Sussman since their Harvard Law days, “I remember him being committed and outspoken on issues of social justice.”

At Harvard, Sussman joined forces with students at other law schools to create fellowships to fund law students' work at public-service organizations. The Equal Justice Foundation is still at work.

Fresh out of Harvard in 1978, Sussman joined Carter's Justice Department, in the Civil Rights Division. When the Reagan Revolution brought a change in focus — Sussman said Attorney General William French Smith wanted to focus on elevating the rights of white people — the young lawyer was named assistant general counsel at the NAACP national office in Manhattan.

Then came Yonkers.

The long view

The Green Meadow Waldorf case is the latest case in a career that has found him at the center of controversy and high-pitched public debate in cases that drag on.

The Yonkers case lasted 26 years. By that standard, the measles-ban case is a nanosecond.

Among other high-profile cases:

  • An 8-year battle to block Orange County from opening a $57 million landfill near the Wallkill River. Not only did the new landfill not open, the county was ordered to speed up its cleanup of the pre-existing landfill.
  • A 20-year battle with what Sussman calls "the theocracy" of Kiryas Joel, a religious community in Monroe. Most notably in 1990, Sussman represented Joseph Waldman, whose seven children were expelled from a yeshiva because he ran for a seat on the Kiryas Joel public school board. The school was ordered to re-admit the children.
  • From 2006-2010, he sued the New York attorney general's office on behalf of black and Latino state workers, challenging a civil-service promotion test. The class-action suit was settled for $45 million.

In 2002, he was barred from practicing law for a year when a State Appellate Division judges ruled his firm had deposited clients’ money in its operating account instead of an escrow account, in violation of court rules.

“I’m obviously deeply upset by this,” Sussman said at the time. “I consider it a technical violation. I regret that it happened.”

If the attorney takes the long view, which he clearly does, he generates strong, and long, reactions.

Brian Sokoloff, an attorney whom Sussman nicknamed “Mad Dog,” remembers when Sussman's legal reputation got a juror out of jury duty.

Sokoloff and Sussman were picking a jury when the judge asked prospective jurors if they could remain impartial.

"I remember a juror raising his hand and the man said 'I am aware of what Michael Sussman did in the Yonkers (desegregation) case. I think it was terrible and I can't fairly sit as a juror.'"

The juror was dismissed.

"That's pretty amazing to have a reputation like that with jurors on other cases that know about your cases, and either like you or don't like you because of what you did in some other case," Sokoloff said.

Orange County acres

If the memory of Yonkers doesn't seem to go away, neither is Sussman the kind of lawyer who goes away — except when he goes home, to his low-profile private life.

He and his wife, Lee Squires — a master electrician and stage lighting designer — live on 80 acres in Chester, as far from headlines as one can seemingly get. 

His office at Sussman & Watkins isn’t in Manhattan. It’s in Goshen.

They have seven children, ages 18 to 31, about whom Sussman would say little.

"No, there are no civil-rights lawyers, yet, but they're all doing very well," he said. "They've been very well-educated and they're all doing very well." 

Were they vaccinated when they were of school age?

"I don't get into whether they're vaccinated or not," Sussman says, seeming to bristle at the question. "It wasn't really an issue to me, so maybe that answers the question. It was not an issue, it was not a controversy to me personally. I was like most people when my children were younger."

Then the lawyer, who finds himself suing on behalf of parents who vehemently oppose vaccines and assert their right to do so, offers a subtle aside.

"I also remember there were experiences of vaccinations and effects of vaccinations which were not pleasant. But none of that is impelling me one way or the other. I don't personalize these things."

Email: pkramer@lohud.com. Contributing: Robert Brum, David Robinson

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