Second Request to Move Trial Denied

CAMDEN, N.J.: The murder trial of the Cherry Hill rabbi accused of arranging for his wife to be killed will start as scheduled next week after a judge Wednesday denied a request to move the proceedings. Superior Court Judge Linda G. Baxter did not accept arguments from a psychologist hired by Rabbi Fred J. Neulander's defense team who opined that the pool of potential jurors in Camden County was tainted. Baxter turned down a similar request in January. The motion she responded to Wednesday was filed last month after jury selection was more than half complete. Neulander's attorneys did not immediately return calls seeking comment Wednesday evening.

The defense argued that it would be virtually impossible to find 16 unbiased people to serve in the high-profile murder-for-hire case.

Camden County First Assistant Prosecutor James Lynch said the process over the past seven weeks in which a field of more than 750 potential jurors was narrowed to 60 weeded out those with prejudices in the case. After two of those 60 were excused last week, 58 potential jurors remained.

Leonard Goldschmidt, a psychologist who also has a law degree, testified on behalf of the defense that potential jurors indicated in a survey that public and media sentiment was against Neulander. In her ruling, Baxter questioned Goldschmidt's methodology, his findings and whether he even qualified as an expert witness.

In his study, Goldschmidt looked at 164 surveys from the nearly 300 completed by potential jurors. He said that while those jurors indicated they had not made up their minds, they believed people they heard discussing the case had decided the rabbi's guilt.

And the more potential jurors had heard about the case, the more likely it was they would perceive a media slant toward the prosecution, he said.

Baxter said the study may have shown potential jurors saw bias, but not that they were biased themselves. But Goldschmidt said the publicity had to affect the potential jurors as well. "People, either consciously or unconsciously, may not have recognized that they had an opinion on Fred J. Neulander when, in fact, they did have an opinion," Goldschmidt argued.

The judge agreed with Lynch's assessment that while many in the public may think Neulander arranged his wife's murder, the 58 remaining potential jurors will have open minds because they were carefully selected through interviews with lawyers and the judge that averaged some 40 minutes each.

"Dr. Goldschmidt's report shows nothing except you can't pick the first 16 people off the street and throw them in the jury box in a capital case," Lynch said.

If it begins as scheduled, the trial will start just weeks shy of the seventh anniversary of Carol Neulander's slaying. She was found by her husband on the floor of their Cherry Hill home around 9:30 p.m. on Nov. 1, 1994.

The rabbi, 60, became a suspect several months into the investigation, but wasn't charged until 1998. Authorities said he wanted his wife dead so he could carry on an affair.

The trial was scheduled to begin in 2000 before a startling confession changed everything and made prosecutors decide to seek the death penalty for Neulander. In April 1999, Len Jenoff, a private investigator who had been among Neulander's more fervent defenders, said the rabbi paid him and another man to kill Carol Neulander, a successful businesswoman who worked at a bakery she had founded more than a decade earlier.

In a separate ruling Wednesday, Baxter said Nancy Phillips, the reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer to whom Jenoff confessed, could be called as a witness but could only be asked to verify that the stories under her byline were her work and were accurate.

Copyright 2001 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

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Author: 6 ABC - Action News