Willie Bosket

The trial for Willie Bosket was held in the Family Court building on Lafayette Street in lower Manhattan. He was charged with three separate felonies-two counts of murder and one of attempted murder, which meant three different trials.

Judge Edith Miller had seen Willie before and she thought him too bright to be in so much trouble. Yet this time in court he was belligerent to the point of needing to be restrained, and his foul-mouthed manner surprised her. What disturbed her more was his lack of moral sense and his insensitivity to the victims' families. He forced the widow of Moises Perez to testify that it was indeed her husband's body that she had identified. Even at the Spofford Juvenile Center where he was confined, he had stabbed another boy with a fork, hit a counselor in the face, and choked a psychiatrist. Later he bragged that, though he was only fifteen, he had committed over two thousand crimes, twenty-five of them stabbings.

Willie approached his trials with an air of total detachment. He did not realize that he was now going through a new procedure, different from only two years earlier, and things were fairly serious. He even thought he could skip the trial if he wanted to, but not by pleading guilty. As the trials went along, Willie finally tired of it all and impulsively told his surprised lawyer to enter a plea of guilty. Silbering insisted he must plead to all three counts, which he did. The sentencing date was set, and Silbering tried to think of ways to get more than the maximum five years for these crimes. However, with no precedent, there was nothing he could do.

Willie was placed with the Division of Youth for a maximum sentence of five years. By the time he was twenty-one, he would be free.