33 Facts About Michael Musmanno

Michael Angelo Musmanno was an American jurist, politician, and naval officer.

In 1951, Michael Musmanno was elected as a justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, where he served until his death in 1968.

Michael Musmanno set a record for the number of dissenting opinions filed.

Michael Musmanno was born in Stowe Township, in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, an industrial neighborhood a few miles west of Pittsburgh, into an ethnic Italian family originally from Noepoli, Basilicata.

Michael Musmanno worked with his father in the coal mines, began law school at Georgetown University in 1915, leaving to serve as an infantryman in World War I before returning to earn an LL.

Michael Musmanno became a labor lawyer and always kept a sympathy for the working man.

When miner John Barkoski was beaten to death in Imperial, Pennsylvania in 1929 by the Coal and Iron Police during a strike, Michael Musmanno was outraged and, as a state legislator, introduced a bill to banish this private police force.

In 1931, Michael Musmanno became the youngest judge in the county court of Allegheny County; he was nominated by both Democrats and Republicans and endorsed by the labor organizations.

Michael Musmanno switched to the Democratic Party in 1932 while canvassing for Franklin D Roosevelt as a president.

In 1943, during World War II, Michael Musmanno entered the United States Navy as a line officer assigned as a military attorney, since the navy had not yet formed its own Judge Advocate General's Corps.

Michael Musmanno served as Allied Military Governor of the Sorrentine Peninsula in Italy.

Michael Musmanno opposed the forcible repatriation to the Soviet Union of Cossacks and refugees, many of whom did not want to be repatriated.

Michael Musmanno was successful in aiding some of these people.

Michael Musmanno served as a member of the court during the military trials of Milch and Pohl.

In 1961, Michael Musmanno testified as a prosecution witness in Jerusalem in the Israeli trial of Adolf Eichmann.

In 1948, Michael Musmanno conducted interviews with several people who had worked closely with Adolf Hitler in the very last days of World War II, in an attempt to disprove claims of Hitler's escape despite his presumed suicide at the end of the Battle of Berlin.

Additionally, Michael Musmanno wrote a screenplay about Hitler's fate, which he hoped Alfred Hitchcock would direct.

In 1980, Michael Musmanno's relatives donated his archives to Duquesne University; in 2007, the school digitized the footage of the interviews for a 2010 German TV documentary, with an American version airing in 2015.

Michael Musmanno tried to re-enter politics, running unsuccessfully for Lieutenant Governor in 1950.

Michael Musmanno was noted for testifying for the prosecution in the 1950 anti-Communist sedition case against Steve Nelson, who was leading a regional branch of the American Communist Party.

Michael Musmanno demanded that the attorney state whether he was a communist, and when the attorney declined to answer, Michael Musmanno held him in contempt and forbade the attorney from practicing in his court.

Michael Musmanno gained name recognition from his part in the Nelson trial.

Michael Musmanno was elected in 1951 as justice to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, serving from 1952 to his death in 1968.

Michael Musmanno was noted for his dissenting opinions; during his first 5 years on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, he wrote more dissenting opinions than all of the other justices on the court had collectively written in the previous 50 years.

In Perpetua v Philadelphia Transportation Company, Musmanno wrote the dissenting opinion, while in Koehler v Schwartz, he wrote the prevailing opinion, in which Stern joined him.

In one case, because Michael Musmanno had failed to circulate a dissenting opinion among the other justices before he filed it, the piece was not published in the official Pennsylvania State Reports.

Michael Musmanno sought a writ of mandamus to require its publication.

Michael Musmanno appeared as himself on the February 12,1962 episode of To Tell the Truth.

Michael Musmanno strongly dissented from a 1966 ruling that Henry Miller's book Tropic of Cancer was not obscene.

Michael Musmanno was a gifted narrator and wrote a total of sixteen books, some reflecting his court cases.

Michael Musmanno described the sedition case in his book, Across the Street from the Courthouse.

Michael Musmanno doubted that the earlier exploration had occurred on the basis that the alleged Vinland Map was a falsification.

Justice Michael Musmanno died the following day, October 12,1968, Columbus Day.