Gerald Kogan, a renowned Miami attorney-judge who defended one of the McDuffie cops in the momentous 1980 trial, died Thursday. He was 87.
Early in his career, he was chief of major crimes as a prosecutor for Miami-Dade State Attorney Richard Gerstein. He went on to become a Miami-Dade circuit court judge and eventually rose to chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court. In his later years, he was celebrated for his work against the death penalty.