The life of Riverhead native son, World War II veteran and noted jurist Thomas Stark was celebrated yesterday in a ceremony at the State Supreme Court, where family, friends and colleagues gathered for an unveiling of his official portrait.
Stark’s portrait, by Maryland artist Maud Taber-Thomas, will hang in the courthouse alongside other noted judges, including Judge John Cohalan and Judge Peter Fox Cohalan, whose portraits were also unveiled during yesterday’s ceremonies, presented by the Suffolk County Courts’ Historical Committee.
Suffolk County District Administrative Judge Randall Hinrichs, who presided over the ceremonies in Judge Paul Baisley Jr.’s third-floor courtroom, called the three men “legal giants” of Suffolk County.
Stark was born in Riverhead a half-mile from the county courthouse in 1925. He was an officer in the U.S. Navy during the Second World War and went on to earn a law degree from Harvard in 1949. He served as Riverhead town attorney and justice of the peace, then spent six years as a county court judge before his election as State Supreme Court justice in 1969. He sat on the state bench for 29 years until he retired in 1998.
His achievements on the bench were many, including his work drafting uniform jury instructions for the state, which remain in effect to this day. He was supervising judge of the superior criminal courts of Suffolk County from 1978 to 1992 and an associate justice of the Appellate Term, Ninth And Tenth Judicial Districts from 1985 until 1998. He was named judge of the year by the Suffolk County Criminal Bar Association in 1984.
Stark presided over one of Suffolk County’s most notorious homicide trials, that of the infamous “Amityville Horror” killer Ronald DeFeo Jr., convicted of murdering his parents and four siblings in 1974.
“Dad would regale us with stories of his trials over dinner, often much to my mother’s great dismay,” his daughter, Beth Stark Dugan said yesterday during remarks prior to the portrait unveiling. “We heard all the gory details and we didn’t think until many years later that this was strange.
Stark presided over more than 235 trials over the course of his career. The DeFeo trial, while the most infamous, was only one of several murder trials he handled. When he passed away in 2014 at age 89, Stark was finishing up a book he called “Horrendous Homicides.” His daughter Ellen Stark is currently editing it and expects it will be published later this year.
Stark also presided over the trial in the lawsuit brought by the Long Island Lighting Company against the Town of Brookhaven and the Shoreham-Wading River School District, finding in favor of the utility company which alleged its Shoreham nuclear power plant had been grossly over-assessed for purposes of real property taxation.
“That decision didn’t make Dad too popular,” Beth Dugan Stark said. “But I will note that it was upheld on appeal.”
The judge was a history buff and in 2005 published a history of his beloved home town, “Riverhead: The Halcyon Years, 1861-1919,” in which he recounts an unprecedented — perhaps never to be replicated — era of progress for Riverhead, the seat of Suffolk County government and a regional center of commerce.
Jane Crabtree Stark, his wife of 58 years, was in the audience for yesterday’s ceremonies and said afterward she was moved by the acknowledgement of her husband’s judicial career.
“He really had such a distinguished career statewide,” she said. “He was a brilliant man.”
Also honored yesterday were John P. Cohalan and Peter Fox Cohalan, a father and son who left a big imprint on Suffolk County’s judicial system and government.
John Cohalan, a former Suffolk district attorney, served on the bench for 22 years, from 1961 to 1983. He was elevated to the Appellate Division, Second Department in 1974. He passed away in 1988 at age 80.
Peter Fox Cohalan, 80, served as supervisor of the Town of Islip and then Suffolk County executive, a post he held from 1980 to 1986. He was elected justice of the State Supreme Court in 1987 and served on the bench until his retirement in 2012.
Editor’s note: This story has been amended to reflect a correction to the number of years the Starks were married.
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