Bucks judge casts a long shadow

He adjudicates from a wheelchair now, oxygen tubes nestled under the rims of his glasses as he speaks. But Albert Cepparulo's voice - coated in a thick Port Richmond accent - remains strong and steady, handing down sentences that range from empathetic to staggering.

Last year, for example, the Bucks County Common Pleas Court judge gave an 81-year-old man 935 to 1,870 years for sexually assaulting a girl and videotaping the abuse. More recently, he spared a man from jail time for drug possession, concerned he could lose his job.

Cepparulo has stayed on the bench even when his fellow judges thought he was too ill to work. Last year, they asked Ronald D. Castille, then the chief justice of Pennsylvania's Supreme Court, to persuade his old friend to retire.

"I couldn't do it," said Castille, who stepped down in December because he turned 70, the mandatory retirement age. "If he was a fighter and he wanted to work, that was his own personal choice."

Cepparulo, 68, made the choice on his own last month, notifying Gov. Wolf that he will retire in September after 11 years, citing health reasons that include a long-term infection that has paralyzed his left leg and affected his breathing.

Cepparulo's retirement will cap a 40-year-plus legal career that began in Philadelphia's public defender's office and included his becoming one of Bucks County's most high-powered criminal defense lawyers.

Inspired by his working-class upbringing on Memphis Street in Philadelphia and his time in Vietnam, Cepparulo said, he wanted to protect the "small guy, the guy who had no power."

"I never thought the law would be something I would do for money," he said. "To this day, I would still be a Philadelphia public defender, but for my wife growing up in Bucks County and me not wanting to travel into Philadelphia every day. It's the best move of my life, other than getting married and having children."

A longtime college and club rugby player with a big presence, Cepparulo the defense lawyer could be flamboyant in the courtroom, and he was unparalleled at winning over juries and recalling case law to prove points to a judge.

"Physically, the man was built like a cinder-block wall. You could light a match off him," said Lou Busico, a Bucks County defense lawyer who argued against Cepparulo as a prosecutor, worked in his Solebury law firm, and eventually tried cases before the judge.

"I knew I was in for a 12-round fight when I had a case against him," Busico said. "But afterward he'd always say, 'C'mon, stunad' - Italian slang for someone dim-witted - 'let's go get a piece of pizza.' "

Cepparulo's mother was a meat wrapper - only men could be butchers back then - and his father was a Philadelphia policeman and a protégé of Frank L. Rizzo, the future police commissioner and mayor. Cepparulo, however, followed a different trajectory.

A graduate of Central High School, he put himself through Pennsylvania State University working in a Philadelphia paper mill, which is where he saw the injustices that made him want to be a lawyer. Some people got promotions over others simply because of connections to the boss, he said.

That feeling grew when he was drafted to serve in Vietnam, a war he did not support. Cepparulo worked in counterintelligence, sometimes translating interrogations of Viet Cong soldiers. There he noticed that a disproportionate number of poor black men were sent into combat.

Back home after the war, he drove a cab to put himself through Temple Law School. In the public defender's office, where he spent much of the 1970s, Cepparulo once danced so hard at one of the office's parties that the sole of his shoe came off. His friends put it on a plaque in Temple's law library.

After he moved to Bucks County, one of his biggest cases was fighting one of Pennsylvania's first civil forfeiture seizures, a pot dealer's 130-acre horse farm. He took it all the way to the state Supreme Court, arguing that the farm and its horses were not the spoils of the enterprise. He lost the case.

"He was very demonstrative in court," the defendant, George Reitz Jr., said last week. "He picked up a 55-gallon drum and bounced it on the witness stand" to prove a point.

Cepparulo also defended Abbie Hoffman, perhaps the Vietnam War's most famous protester, after Hoffman moved to Bucks County in the 1980s and joined environmental protests involving the Delaware River.

"He didn't just represent wealthy people or cases of big notoriety," said Cepparulo's former law partner, Robert Baldi, who also is a Bucks County judge. "He was also representing people for free, small people whose issues were big to them."

Jules Epstein, a longtime friend and Temple Law School's director of advocacy programs, said Cepparulo became a judge in 2004 so he could "do right" and continue to help people.

"It doesn't mean you won't send someone to jail or find lots of people guilty," Epstein said. "But you'll do it fairly every time. And while you're doing it, you're going to keep your eye on addressing other issues, such as social services and how to treat kids in a courtroom."

Cepparulo said he hopes to serve as a senior judge during his retirement, filling in for full-time judges when needed. He also plans to spend more time with wife, Debbie, and their two adult children and one grandchild.

"I think a lot of people have done a lot more amazing things than me," Cepparulo said. "I'm just fortunate to be loved by so many people."

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