Page 8 - NYLS Magazine • 2016 • Vol 35, No. 1

The Trial of the Century
New York Law School alumni also played leading roles in some of the nation’s
most celebrated trials. In what for many years was described as the trial of the century, New Jersey Attorney General David T. Wilentz, Class of 1917, led the prosecution of Bruno Richard Hauptman for the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh’s infant son. Hauptman was apprehended and arrested in the Bronx and needed to be extradited to New Jersey for prosecution. One other NYLS alumnus was involved in the case as well.
The lawyer who represented Hauptman in the Bronx extradition proceeding was James M. Fawcett, Class of 1912, who went on to become a New York Supreme Court Justice in 1948.
Hauptman was convicted and executed, but The Law Book addresses
one of the other consequences of that trial: the first concerted effort to prohibit photography—still and moving—in America’s court rooms. A 1935 American Bar Association prohibition, Judicial Canon 35, was a direct result of the circus atmosphere that surrounded the Hauptman trial. Estimates had put the press coverage at seven hundred reporters and cameramen in daily attendance. The organized bar found the excessive coverage and incessant barrage of flashbulbs unseemly. In 1937, the ABA officially adopted Judicial Canon 35, barring photographic and broadcast coverage of state court proceedings, and in 1944, Congress implemented a similar ban in federal criminal cases. Today, all states regulate the use of cameras in certain courts, though with varying levels of restrictiveness.
The Red Scare
The Watergate Investigation and Prosecution
New Jersey Attorney General David T. Wilentz, Class of 1917
When New York Law School reopened in 1947 (after having closed for six years as a result of the World War II draft
and lower enrollment), the country was already enmeshed in a second Red Scare and the early stages of McCarthyism. The Law Book covers the 1948 trials of The Hollywood Ten (the story underlying
the 2015 movie Trumbo) and the 1954 Communist Control Act. Sandwiched between those two entries were the two trials of Alger Hiss, who had been accused of being a Soviet spy and was eventually
Committee Office and the investigation of its cover-up was Seymour Glanzer, a member of the Class of 1960. Those investigations ultimately lead to what The Law Book describes as one of the landmark decisions prompted by the Watergate break-in and President Nixon’s refusal to turn over what became known as the Watergate tapes. The following is an abbreviated summary:
The 1972 burglary of the Democratic Party’s Watergate offices led to the appointment of a special prosecutor
to investigate. When President Nixon refused to turn over tapes of conversations recorded in his White House office, a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, obtained a subpoena ordering him to do so. U.S. District Judge John Sirica denied President Nixon’s motion to quash the subpoena, rejecting his claim of executive privilege. After President Nixon went to the Court of Appeals
for the District of Columbia Circuit, Jaworski took
the unusual step of seeking immediate Supreme Court review. Given the importance of the issue and a need for speedy resolution, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the appeal without the benefit of an intermediate appellate decision. Less than three weeks after arguments in the case, the Court unanimously affirmed Judge Sirica’s decision... The Court rejected the President’s argument that his claim of executive privilege was not reviewable by the judiciary, citing Marbury v. Madison’s famous pronouncement that, “it is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” Reaching the merits of the case, the Court found, for the first time, “constitutional underpinning,” for a claim of executive privilege but refused to define that privilege as absolute. Unless the President can identify specific dangers that can arise from disclosure of information claimed to be subject to the privilege, a prosecutor’s particularized showing of need will overcome the
Seymour Glanzer, Class of 1960
In the 1948 congressional hearings before the House Committee on Un-American Activities that resulted in Hiss’s trial, one of the committee members who influenced the tenor and direction of the hearings
was then-Congressman Richard Nixon.
A quarter of a century later, President Nixon’s role in the 1972 Watergate
scandal was about to emerge. One of the three original Watergate prosecutors who participated in the grand jury investigation of the break-in of the Democratic National
Lloyd Paul Stryker, Class of 1906
convicted of perjury. Although neither trial is addressed in the book, two New York Law School alumni played vital roles. Lloyd Paul Stryker, Class of 1906, who the legendary Irving Younger referred to as “the preeminent criminal lawyer of his generation,” represented Hiss at his first trial, which resulted in a hung jury. Judge Henry Warren Goddard, Class of 1901, presided over the retrial, where Hiss retained new counsel and was convicted. A portrait of Stryker hangs in the Mendik Library’s Roger J. Miner ’56 Reading Room.
6 NEw York Law ScHooL magazINE • 2016 • VOL. 35, NO. 1