Jackie Stack, judge whose legal career began at 48, dies of coronavirus

Elaine Jackson Stack of Mineola and Shelter Island — a prosecutor, defense lawyer, village deputy mayor, judge and mother of four whose career outside the home began at age 48, died Saturday. She was 89.

The cause was complications from the pandemic disease COVID-19, according to her son, Ron Stack. Just before Thanksgiving, he said, his mom developed respiratory symptoms, and was later diagnosed with the coronavirus at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset.

Until her death, she was part of a panel that adjudicated allegations of lawyer misconduct and was also of counsel and head of family and divorce mediation for the Garden City law firm of Barket Epstein Kearon Aldea & LoTurco, capping a four-decade-long career in Long Island's legal system on the bench and bar.

During nearly eight years with the Nassau County district attorney's office, where she would rise to be deputy chief of the rackets bureau, Stack prosecuted child sodomites and pornographers; a light heavyweight boxer turned insurance fraudster and loan shark; and the Colombo family underboss John "Sonny" Franzese; among others.

Then, in one of her successes as a defense lawyer specializing in appellate work, she beat her old office by convincing the state’s highest court to overturn a client’s conviction over a barroom shooting.

Later, as a Democrat running in 1993 for a judgeship, she noted in an interview with Newsday that men dominated Long Island's slate of judicial candidates.

"If this year's race is any talisman of where women are today — with 12 candidates for Supreme Court, only one woman running, and only one woman sitting," she said, "that's appalling."

She lost that year.

Her son, Ron, described in an email Sunday that his mom came of age at a time when society had a different expectation for women’s roles.

"My mother grew up at a time when women could not take professional opportunities for granted. So while she certainly inspired me as a parent, she was truly inspirational to all of the women she met as a lawyer, educator and judge," said Ron Stack, a former corporate lawyer who now teaches college English.

She was elected in 1996 to Nassau’s district court, then State Supreme Court in 2000 and assigned to the matrimonial part, where she heard divorce, property and custody cases.

Several years before becoming a judge, she was Long Island's representative to a statewide committee screening lawyers for defendants at risk for New York's now-defunct capital punishment system.

She also served on the Commission on the Future of Indigent Defense Services, in 2005, and the Special Commission on the Future of New York State Courts, which in 2007 concluded that the state "has the most archaic and bizarrely convoluted court structure in the country" and "an inefficient and wasteful system that causes harm and heartache to all manner of litigants, and costs businesses, municipalities and taxpayers in excess of half a billion dollars per year."

She left the bench that year, after reaching 76, the state’s mandatory retirement age for judges.

Elaine Jackson, who went by Jackie, was born Oct. 27, 1931, in the South Bronx, the last of three children of the former Elsa Kamioner, a bookkeeper for the New York City government, and Bernard Jackson, who worked in hotel catering. Both Ashkenazi Jews, Bernard had immigrated from Poland as a child; Elsa was born in the Bronx shortly after her parents immigrated.

(Bernard's family surname had probably been changed to "Jackson" upon his immigration to the United States, Ron said.)

Raised in the South Bronx, Jackie graduated — early, at 16 — in 1947 from Manhattan’s Hunter High, which was then a girls school for the intellectually gifted. She started college at Hunter, but left before graduating when her mom had a stroke, and Jackie went to work to support the family.

In 1951, she met her future husband, Norman Stack, on the sands of Long Beach, where her friends and his had connected. Initially skittish about dating him because she was taller, she relented after one of her girl friends told her: "If you don't take him I will, and you'll never forgive me," their son, Ron, recalled Sunday.

The couple married two years later, and soon after Norman Stack was drafted into the Army. They lived in Bamberg, Germany, for two years where he was stationed, then returned to the U.S., living in Jamaica Estates, Queens, with his parents. The young couple later bought a house in Roslyn Heights with a veterans mortgage, and later moved to East Hills, where in the late 1980s into the mid-1990s, she would be trustee, deputy mayor, and member of the zoning board of appeals.

While raising her family, Stack talked over the years about wanting to return to college, Ron said.

In 1971, she later completed her studies, from what was then called C.W. Post College of Long Island University, then graduate school there in library science in 1973, and St. John’s law school in 1979, a year before her youngest child graduated from high school. Stack joined the district attorney's office that year.

In addition to son Ron of Mendham, New Jersey, Stack is survived by children, Brenda Stack Freed of Arlington, Virginia, a litigation paralegal, Dede Stack Unger of Roslyn Estates, a law firm administrator, and Claudia Stack Strobing of Richmond, Virginia, a pastry chef; 15 grandchildren; and seven great grandchildren.

Stack’s siblings, Emma Jackson and Stuart Jackson, predeceased her.

Stack’s husband, the numismatist Norman Stack, died in 1992. Her partner, Sanford L. Goldsmith, died in 2015. The Stacks and the Goldsmiths had been neighbors in Roslyn Heights, and Jackie and Sandy got closer after both of their spouses had died.

Stack’s funeral, Tuesday at Beth Moses Cemetery in West Babylon, will be limited to family due to restrictions to stop the spread of COVID-19, and shiva, the seven-day Jewish mourning period, will be observed via Zoom.