Veteran Appeals Court Judge Found Dead With Suicide Note

NEW YORK (AP) _ Henry J. Friendly, a judge on the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals since 1959 and its chief judge from 1971 to 1973, was found dead in his bed Tuesday, with several prescription bottles and a suicide note nearby, police said. He was 82.

Friendly’s body was discovered about 10 a.m. by a family member at his Manhattan apartment, a few miles from the courthouse, said police officer Joe McConville.

Friendly was face down in his bed, and the body was taken directly to a morgue, police said. Neither the text of the note nor the contents of the prescription bottles was disclosed.

Friendly’s clerk, Tom Dagger, said the judge had been despondent since the death last year of his wife of 55 years, and that in recent weeks he had been bothered by physical ailments that hampered his work.

Friendly was awarded the Medal of Freedom in 1977 by President Ford and was hailed by colleagues as the possessor of a brilliant and wide-ranging legal mind.

He was officially listed as a senior judge and carried a reduced caseload, but he continued to hear appeals until shortly before his death.

A 1927 graduate of Harvard Law School, Friendly was a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.

He became a partner in a New York law firm in 1937, founded his own firm in 1946, and became a director vice president and general counsel to Pan American World Airways. He held those posts until being appointed to the circuit court by President Eisenhower.

Circuit Judge Irving Kaufman, who served with Friendly on the appeals court since 1961, said Friendly was noted for his expertise in commercial law but added, ″There was nothing that he didn’t do well.″

Last year, in one of the few decisions of its kind on the subject, Friendly wrote a decision reversing a lower judge’s order which required the wife of an alleged Czechoslovakian spy to testify against her husband.

Hana Koecher was justified in invoking the ″marital privilege″ against such testimony, Friendly wrote, because of ″the natural repugnance in every fair-minded person to compelling a wife or husband to be the means of the other’s condemnation.″

Mrs. Koecher and her husband Karl were among the accused Soviet-bloc spies released ealier this year in exchange for freedom for Jewish dissident Anatoly Shcharansky and others.

Friendly, a native of Elmira, married Sophie Stern, the daughter of a chief justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, in 1930. Mrs. Friendly died in March 1985.

Friendly is survived by a son, two daughters, and 11 grandchildren.

A private funeral will be held in Philadelphia, court officials said. The timing of the funeral was not announced.