New York: The Judge’s Son

Darkness was settling on New York City’s Henry Hudson Parkway one Sun day last May when a northbound car suddenly plunged through a six-foot di vider hedge, skittered into the south bound traffic and smashed head-on into another car. All of the people in the northbound car — a seven-year-old boy, his greatgrandparents, his great-aunt and a friend of the family—were killed. The driver of the other car was gravely injured. Motorists braked to a stop and hurried to the wreckage. In the midst of a gathering crowd, Gareth Martinis, 23, peered into the mangled cars, advised spectators not to move the bodies. Then he ran off, leaving his car parked on a nearby exit road.

A short time later, police arrested Martinis in a friend’s apartment not far from the scene of the accident. Witnesses had told police that Martinis’ zigzagging car clipped the rear of the car that went caroming through the parkway hedge.

Speedy Verdict. Apparently expecting the police to come for him, Martinis did not resist arrest, but at the police station he sullenly refused to take a drunkometer test. When two news photographers came into the room, Martinis suddenly went wild. He grabbed a photographer by the throat, clawed and kicked at the cops struggling to pull him away, bit a cop’s finger. He stopped fighting only after policemen snagged him by his long black hair, bloodied his nose and clamped handcuffs on his wrists. “Martinis was like a mad dog,” said Journal-American Photographer Seymour Zee, who witnessed the battle.

Once subdued, Martinis was charged with drunken driving, reckless driving and leaving the scene of the accident. He faced a maximum penalty of $1,500 fine and three years in jail.

When New York City newspapers learned about the arrangements for Martinis’ trial, they emitted growls of protest: he was to be tried before a three-judge panel in the New York City Criminal Court, where his father, Acting Supreme Court Judge Joseph Martinis, had sat as a judge since 1950, gaining a reputation for delivering strong reprimands to careless drivers. District Attorney Isidore Dollinger insisted that young Martinis would get no special favors because of his father’s position. “It doesn’t matter if he is the son of a judge, a President or a Governor,” said Dollinger. “We treat them all alike.”

In court, two cops testified that Martinis seemed drunk when arrested. But three other cops said that Martinis appeared to be sober as a judge—or at least a judge’s son. During the four-day hearing, the prosecution’s case was badly weakened by the cops’ conflicting testimony—so conflicting that a grand jury opened an investigation into the possibility of perjury. Once the evidence was in, the three judges deliberated only five minutes before they found Martinis innocent of all charges.

Speeding Car. The verdict brought on a hurricane of indignation in New York City. Judge Ambrose J. Haddock, a member of the panel that found Martinis innocent, said that the case was “the most notorious I have ever tried in terms of public reaction to the decision.” Buffeted by the howling winds, District Attorney Dollinger began proceedings to obtain a grand jury indictment of Martinis on a charge of vehicular homicide.

While the grand jury was considering the case, the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles held a hearing of its own. Along with the testimony that the three judges had heard, a departmental panel considered some facts about Martinis’ driving record. He was arrested for speeding three times in 16 days in 1959, lost his driver’s license, got it back two months later by lying about past convictions. After the parkway smashup, police found ten unanswered traffic tickets in the glove compartment of his car (five for driving with a defective muffler, five for parking violations). In late July, the department announced its findings: 1) Martinis was speeding on the evening of the accident; 2) he was zigzagging through traffic; 3) “the accident was a direct result of Martinis’ swerving” from one lane to another; 4) he left the scene of the accident “without reporting or identifying himself” to police; 5) the police had reasonable grounds to believe that he was driving while drunk because he “had an odor of intoxicants on his breath, was incoherent, and was unsteady on his feet at least one half-hour after the occurrence of the accident.” Then the Department of Motor Vehicles dealt out the hardest punishment within its reach: it revoked Martinis’ driver’s license. Eugene Kramon, a Manhattan slacks manufacturer who was the only survivor of the parkway collision, heard of the penalty in his hospital bed. “Giant punishment, isn’t it?” he said.

Early last week Martinis finally got around to paying another penalty: $65 in fines for his five defective-muffler tickets, issued in mid-April and mid-May. And that was not the end of the road. At week’s end, the grand jury indicted Martinis on five counts of vehicular homicide—one for each person who died on the Henry Hudson Parkway that Sunday evening in May.