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• 1 2022-12-08T21:35:39+00:00 In the Municipal court on October 30 (1) 31 plain 2024-01-26T19:06:42+00:00 In an opinion dated October 30, 1935, Judge Benjamin Shalleck denied the motion of the city's attorneys to set aside the jury's verdict awarding damages to William Feinstein. It had taken him a month to research the law to confirm the approval he gave to the verdict in discharging the jury. The opinion was published as Feinstein v. City of New York, 157 Misc. 157 (1935). The scrapbooks of the Mayor's office on which this study relied for newspaper stories in the months after the disorder included only two clippings related to Shalleck's decision; three additional stories were found in Newspapers.com. It would be surprising if there were not other stories on the decision in newspapers that had reported on Feinstein's trial such as the Home News, New York Sun, New York Post, New York Evening Journal, and New York American.
  
  As they had in covering the trial, the stories led with the implications of the verdict. The existence of $1,000,000 of additional claims resulting from the riot was again alluded to in editorials in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and Times Union and a story in the New York Times, but linked in this case to more than a hundred pending cases. The Daily News reported the total claims as $2 million, which given that no other publication reported it must be an error. There were 160 pending cases in the Municipal Court, according to the New York Herald Tribune, the same number it reported after the trial of Anna Rosenberg's claim two weeks earlier. Alongside the impending claims the stories in New York Herald Tribune, New York Times, Daily News, and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle editorial quoted the judge's statement that the law could be exploited by "concerted efforts on the part of some persons to use the statute as a means of enrichment," presenting it as a warning rather than simply an acknowledgement of the prediction offered by Mayor La Guardia after the trial of Feinstein's case. They also quoted Judge Shalleck's comment making clear that addressing those potential problems was a task for the legislature, not him. Details of the store manger's evidence summarized in the decision appeared in the New York Times story, more information on those events than in the newspaper's earlier reporting on the trial, but that evidence was misattributed to Feinstein himself. The Times Union editorial made the same mistake, in a briefer summary that described Feinstein, rather than his store manager, closing the store and a "mob of thirty or forty persons" who broke open the gate and took liquor from the store. The New York Herald Tribune more accurately attributed the evidence to "witnesses for Mr Feinstein."
  
  Only the stories in the New York Herald Tribune and New York Times, and the Times Union editorial, mentioned any of the issues that Shalleck decided, and then only the issue of whether a riot occurred. Unreported were other issues raised in the motion that Shalleck's decision examined and rejected: Feinstein's failure to notify the city as soon as he learned of the threat to his store and take reasonable care to protect his property, and the typographical error in the complaint.
• 1 2023-05-27T01:23:26+00:00 In civil court on October 30 17 plain 2024-01-26T19:08:23+00:00 Two weeks after the jury in the second trial of a damage claim awarded $804 to Anna Rosenberg, Judge Benjamin Shalleck published his decision on the city's motion to set aside the verdict in the trial which had awarded damages to William Feinstein. After a "thorough research in the evolution of this statute," Shalleck denied the motion.
  
  If Shalleck's comments at the trial supporting the verdict made that decision unsurprising, he had also found consistent case law contrary to the arguments made in Arnold's motion. On the question of whether a riot had occurred, Shalleck's decision referred to both English decisions in civil actions that relied on common law definitions of riot, and the same similarity between definitions in New York cases. The New York Court of Appeals had found in its 1900 decision in Marshall v. City of Buffalo that such an overlap reflected how the statute involved both branches of the law, was "both compensatory and penal"; that the responsibility of each area for preserving peace within its borders extended to compensation for damage resulting from a riot; and that imposing the burden on the inhabitants of that area was intended to punish them for permitting riots and provide an incentive for them to support law enforcement. Shalleck found similar support in New York case law for his decision to not put to the jury the question of whether Feinstein and his staff had notified the mayor and sheriff. Other courts had found a strict interpretation of that requirement to be "absurd" and so restrictive that it was contrary to the intent of the law to provide compensation. The "liberal and reasonable construction" articulated in those decisions allowed for Shalleck's trial ruling that the store manager's testimony showed it was not just impossible for him to have notified the mayor or sheriff, but unnecessary as the presence of police showed that "the city had already known of the existence of the riot and had even taken measures to quell it."
  
  The motion's final argument related to the law, that reasonable care had not been taken to protect the property that was damaged because Feinstein's staff had not removed stock from the window display, Shalleck had posed as a question to the jury. They had answered yes, reasonable diligence had been used to prevent damage, based on which he dismissed the argument. The appeal for dismissal on the grounds of an error in the complaint also warranted little attention: the incorrect date had no impact on the city's defense, and Feinstein's testimony when the corporation counsel examined him to assess the complaint made clear he knew when the damage had been done.
  
  Shalleck did recognize the city's contention that New York's statute "may have by this time outlived its usefulness." He noted that the corporation counsel had informed him that it would impose considerable loss in relation to the disorder in Harlem and in the future given that "in a city of seven millions of people with such a cosmopolitan population, further disturbances may frequently occur," and that people might use the statute "as a means of enrichment." However, those issues had no bearing on his decision: it was up to the Legislature to reconsider and amend the law. In relation to the law as it stood, there were no grounds for setting aside the jury's award of damages.
  
  The consequences of the decision dominated the limited press response. While Shalleck had not specified the costs to the city of the claims filed in relation to the disorder, stories used the figure of $1 million mentioned by Arnold and Mayor La Guardia after the Feinstein trial. Publications ranging from the New York Times to the Daily News presented Shalleck's account of the concerns about the statute raised by the corporation counsel as coming from the judge himself, as warnings and a call for the law to be changed. None of the stories included a response from the corporation counsel or the mayor.