The Bergen County Court House has been the site of some memorable cases of great notoriety. A few examples follow:

I.

In March 1957, fifteen year-old Vicki Zielinski disappeared one evening after walking towards her Ramsey home from a girlfriend’s home. Her frantic parents searching for her found a loafer of hers on a nearby road, her gloves a few hundred yards away, and the next morning police and her father found Vickie’s body in a Mahwah sand pit, with her clothes in dismay and her head crushed by a baseball bat. Suspicion soon turned to 22 year old Edgar Smith who lived in a nearly trailer park with his wife and infant daughter. After intense interrogation Smith confessed, describing the details of the crime. He had picked up Vicki in his car, and after she rebuffed his sexual advances, assaulted her with the baseball bat as she tried to flee.

He was tried for first-degree murder at the Bergen County Court House. The State was represented by First Assistant Prosecutor and later Superior Court Judge Fred Galda and John Selser defended. The notoriety of the trial filled the court room on each day of the trial. Smith repudiated the written confession, which he had not signed. The jury took only 22 minutes to convict Smith, who was later sentenced to be executed, and sent to death row at Trenton State Prison. Over the next dozen years, he filed nineteen appeals in state and federal courts to attempt to reverse his conviction. He also reached out to conservative talk show host William Buckley, who believed his claims of innocence and who espoused his cause and got him nationally known defense counsel. 111ey were able in 1971 to get his conviction reversed and a new trial ordered by a federal judge on the grounds his confession had been coerced and should not have been admitted into evidence. Without the ability to offer Smith’s confession, the States’ case on a retrial would be much weaker. Offered a plea bargain, he then pleaded guilty to second degree murder and was released on parole the basis of time served, He soon after recanted the confession, and proclaimed his innocence. He then went on Buckley’s television show and made a national tour, lecturing at colleges and universities, and making several other television appearances.

Less than five years later, Smith, then living in California, kidnapped a San Diego mother at knife point. She was able to escape from his moving car despite being stabbed. Another motorist wrote down the license plate nun1ber of Smith1s car, resulting in his arrest Smith was found guilty of kidnapping and attempted murder and sentenced to life imprisonment He went to prison in California where he is still confined.

II.

The name “Baby M” still conjures up recollections of surrogate motherhood. In 1986, a Bergen County couple, the Stems, sought to have a child by finding a surrogate mother to bear the child of Mr. Stem through artificial insemination. Mrs. Stem had medical issues making a pregnancy dangerous to her health. Mary Beth Whitehead, married with two children, responded to their ad seeking a woman, for a fee, to carry his child to term, and surrender it and any parental rights to the other couple. She and the Stems signed an agreement and the fee paid was $10,000. After the child, a girl, was born, and the Sterns took possession, Mrs. Whitehead asked to keep the child another week. With the child, she and her husband fled to Florida. They took other evasive maneuvers before being ordered to turn over the child. The Sterns then sued Whitehead in Bergen County to enforce the surrogacy contract, to secure possession and ultimate custody of the child, and to terminate Mary Beth Whitehead’s parental rights. Mary Beth Whitehead argued the surrogacy contract was invalid as against public policy, as it deprives the mother of her constitutional rights, and she sought primary custody with visitation by Mr. Stern. After a long trial, behind closed doors as a family court matter, but followed avidly in the press, Judge Harvey Sorkow ruled in favor of the Stems, upholding the surrogacy contract and allowing the adoption of the child by Mrs. Stern. The decision was delivered orally over a three hour period by Judge Sorkow to a packed courtroom of journalists and other spectators. Mrs Whitehead appealed.

The New Jersey Supreme Court chose to hear the appeal directly, bypassing the Appellate Division. The Court unanimously reversed Judge Sorkow, holding the surrogacy contract void as against public policy. It remanded for dete1mination of visitation rights for Mrs. Whitehead, since Mr. Stem, the acknowledged biological father, had primary custody.

In order to protect the child’s privacy rights, the parties were enjoined by the court from publicly discussing the child or her personal activities, or selling “movie rights” without approval of the Court, but the parents could discuss issues of surrogate parenting generally. This case arose before the time of in vitro fertilization, in which a 11sun·ogate11 carries a child from a fertilized egg not necessarily her own, so she is not the “natural mother” the way Mary Beth Whitehead was. This is now referred to as  gestational surrogacy.

The absence of cooperation from the Sterns and Mrs. Whitehead did not end publicity of the events. A mini-series entitled Baby M was broadcast by ABC in 1988, and Mary Beth Whitehead published her own book in 1989, “A Mother’s Story: The Truth about the Baby M Case.”. The child, named Melissa by the Stems, and who grew up in their home, was recently married, and at her request, Judge Sorkow, now retired, performed the ceremony.

III.

An inquiry and a series of articles by New York Times reporter Myron Farber in 1976 had encouraged the Bergen County Prosecutor to reopen an investigation into the unexplained 1966 deaths of nine patients at Riverdell Hospital, a small private hospital in Oradell. There was speculation that an unknown “Dr. X” was responsible. Eventually Dr. Mario Jascalevich, a surgeon and native of Argentina, was indicted and charged with murdering five patients using curare, a substance sometimes used in medicine and which is very hard to detect in the body, and which he acknowledged he had used in research on dogs.

The murder trial went on for months in 1978. The prosecutor, diligent but with only four years  experience, was Sybyl Moses, later a Superior Court Judge and Assignment Judge in Bergen County; the defense attorney, Raymond A. Brown, was one of the outstanding criminal defense lawyers in the state. He and his defense team took a suite of offices across from the Court House and settled in for a long siege. Since Myron Farber’s investigations, interviews and articles in 1976 had led the prosecutor to reopen the investigation after 10 years, and there was testimony that Farber still had relevant documents the prosecutor did not have, Brown issued a subpoena to Farber and the New York Times to obtain all of Farber’s notes relating to the matter. The New York Times and Farber responded with a motion to quash the subpoena, and its legal team was led by noted First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams. The Times and Farber argued that under the First Amendment and the New Jersey Shield Law protecting reporter’s sources and notes, the materials did not have to be produced. Judge Arnold ordered the notes to be produced for examination initially only by the Judge. The Times and Farber refused, arguing that such production by itself violated the privileges. Judge Arnold found the parties in civil contempt, levied fines on the Times and Farber, and sent Farber to jail. Criminal contempt proceedings were also filed and Farber and The Times were found guilty of that by Assignment Judge Theodore Trautwein as well, with additional sanctions As Farber sat in jail and fines of $5,000 per day accrued against the Times, the New Jersey Supreme Court heard and rejected their appeal, the U.S. Supreme court denied review and the local federal court denied a petition for relief on First Amendment grounds. The New Jersey Supreme Court, over several vigorous
dissents, held there was a sufficient showing of relevance of the materials sought to support Judge Arnold’s order to produce and finding of civil contempt and Judge Trautwein’s finding of criminal contempt. A further holding was that a criminal defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to produce evidence in his favor trumped the Shield Law.

While the subpoena appeals were going on, so was the trial. Several of the murder counts were dismissed by the court. The trial proceedings consumed many months and witnesses included noted pathologist Dr. Michael Baden, The jury finally acquitted the defendant, Mario Jascalevich, who had earlier surrendered his medical license. Following the acquittal. Farber was released from jail and the daily fines stopped. The total fines were $280,000.

A few years later, Governor Byrne pardoned the New York Times and Myron Farber from the criminal contempt convictions, saying, “Mr. Farber and the Times Company were attempting to uphold a principle they believed in. They should not be burdened by a record of criminal contempt any longer.

The hospital where the deaths occurred never recovered from the bad publicity and closed a few years later. Dr. Jascalevich, his career ruined, returned to his native Argentina where he died in 1984. The myste1y of the patient deaths was never solved.

Faced with the unfavorable ruling on reporter’s privilege from the New Jersey Supreme Court, the New Jersey press, led by The Record and the New Jersey Press Association, launched a legislative campaign to amend the Shield Law to create procedures and showings of materiality which had to be demonstrated before a reporter would have to disclose notes or give testimony. The changes which were enacted have been upheld in later cases .

CONCLUSION

Now the notoriety of a case or trial in the Bergen County Court House is evidenced by swarms of TV network and cable trucks parked around the building, their satellite antennas reaching upward, while correspondents and anchors speak into the TV camera, with the Cou1t House as their background. When an important trial can itself be broadcast, it provides another window for the public to see their courts at work. What is still important is the quality of justice rendered in the court rooms, and public interest and participation is the best way to ensure that justice is done.