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• 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.