FAMILY MAN: Alan Dershowitz shows support for slain Marilyn Dershowitz.
HOT SEAT: Postal driver Ian Clement, outside court yesterday, is charged in Marilyn Dershowitz’s fatal hit-run. (
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He has stood in the well of some of the most celebrity-drenched courtrooms, most memorably as a Dream Teamer in the O.J. Simpson case.
But yesterday, defense lawyer and noted Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz was in the audience of a little-reported Manhattan criminal case — and not as an attorney, but as a victim.
His sister-in-law, lawyer Marilyn Dershowitz, 68, was the victim of a tragic alleged hit-and-run in July 2011, and Dershowitz came to court for a look at her killer, a postal driver who had a court appearance before going on trial Monday on felony charges of leaving the scene of a fatal accident.
“I know what it feels like to be a victim, and to be the family member of a victim,” Dershowitz had said the night before, during a panel discussion on the O.J. Simpson case, hosted by Pace University Law School.
“I’ll be in the audience tomorrow,” Dershowitz said, mentioning the hit-and-run case, for which driver Ian Clement faces a possible four-year prison sentence if convicted.
Dershowitz — who also has repped Mike Tyson, Patty Hearst and Jim Bakker, and famously helped overturn the conviction of Claus von Bulow — declined to speak of the hit- and-run case or his new role as crime victim yesterday, instead deflecting the spotlight.
“You know what I don’t like? I don’t like the press accounts that refer to Marilyn as my sister-in-law,” he told reporters. “She was Nathan’s wife,” he said, referring to his brother.
But Nathan, who is also a lawyer and who was bicycling with his wife along West 29th Street at the time of the accident, had much to say yesterday.
Clement’s lawyer, John Arlia, has argued that Clement simply did not know he had hit the woman and her bicycle.
Clement admits he felt a bump and pulled over briefly after hearing horns honking behind him, Arlia has said — even looking out his rear view mirror to see that traffic had stopped — but he then continued on his route because he’d no way of knowing what he’d done.
“It’s absurd,” Nathan told The Post yesterday of the defense contention. “If he looked out his rear view mirror, he would have seen Marilyn lying on the ground and people leaning over her.”
“How could somebody not know when there is a bicycle ahead of you, and then you feel a bump, and then the bicycle is gone — and people immediately are running to the scene?” the husband said.
“As he was pulling away, police or postal inspectors were running after him screaming,” he said.
The trial will be heard by Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Ruth Pickholtz.