EXACTO-ING JUSTICE: After Judge Michael Gary (below) made an error that let "Poster Boy" Henry Matyjewicz (above) slide for cutting up subway ads, he jailed him for failing to show up to his hearing.
Hell hath no fury like a judge embarrassed.
A red-faced Brooklyn jurist -- smarting from an oversight that forced him to let a subway vandal go free last week -- yesterday seized on the man's inability to show up in court to hit him with 11 months behind bars. Justice Michael Gary said the failure of the subway vandal-artist known as Poster Boy to appear in court last Thursday meant his carefully negotiated no-jail plea was now worthless.
"I owe you nothing," Gary told Poster Boy, whose real name is Henry Matyjewicz, 28.
Matyjewicz's lawyer, Kerry Gotlib, said the judge's action was unreasonable and vowed to appeal.
"He's speechless," Gotlib said of his client. "He's shocked. The guy should not be there."
Although the judge cited Poster Boy's cavalier attitude toward attendance as the reason for the jail term, he might also have been steaming over the coverage he got in The Post over his first, failed attempt to jail Matyjewicz. The judge had been asked to trash the plea deal because Matyjewicz had been re-arrested twice -- once for the very same kind of vandalism -- after pleading guilty in late 2009.
But on Thursday the judge said he couldn't penalize Poster Boy for getting collared anew because he'd never warned him that staying out of trouble was a condition of the deal.
In a written decision, he insisted he remembered issuing such a warning and implied faulty court stenography caused it to be left out of the transcript. All of which would have meant Matyjewicz's deal for 210 hours of community service should have stayed in place -- except that the razor-wielding slicer of subway ads failed to show up. Instead, Poster Boy arrived at court Friday and was promptly tossed in jail for the weekend. Yesterday, Gary said the failure to appear was a violation of the conditions of the plea deal, and he promptly scuttled it. For his part, Poster Boy claimed to have confused the dates, an excuse Gary called "poppycock."
It's not the first time Gary's actions have been perceived as vindictive. In 2003, an appeals court rapped the judge for a 15-year maximum sentence he handed down in a robbery case where the defendant had beaten a murder charge. The appeals court said Gary was punishing the defendant, Jared Errington, for the murder, rather than the robbery, and sent the case back for sentencing by a different judge.
Errington got 12 years the second time.
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