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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.