Martin Stolar, social justice advocate, dies at 81
Martin R. Stolar, a prominent civil rights attorney who defended war objectors and prisoners who rioted at Attica Prison in the early 1970s and who brought a landmark lawsuit to stop the New York Police Department from spying on left-wing activists, died July 1 in Manhattan. He was 81.
According to his wife Elsie Chandler, he died in hospital of heart failure while awaiting surgery for a broken hip.
Mr. Stolar belonged to a generation of idealistic lawyers who, inspired by the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement, gave up their lucrative careers to use their expertise for social justice.
“He had a practice that not only defended people in need but also galvanized social movements,” said Franklin Siegel, a Distinguished Lecturer at the City University of New York School of Law who knew Mr. Stolar for nearly six decades.
The righteous passion of others in the so-called movement waned over the years, but not that of Mr. Stolar. If anything, it became more fierce.
Weeks before his death, he was on an organizing call to defend Columbia University students arrested for protesting the war in Gaza. He also offered advice on defending climate protesters. arrested after they took on Wall Street banks for financing fossil fuel projects.
Ron Kuby, the left-wing lawyer and talk radio host, shared a text message he received from a climate activist who was in Manhattan court observing the trials of more than 100 protesters on the day Stolar died.
As word spread and the activist texted Mr. Kuby, “those who knew Marty” began to cry, and those who didn’t know him were left wondering “why all their lawyers were crying.”
“Marty was one of the last of a great generation of movement lawyers who stood with protesters, protesters and dissidents for decades as they fought for a more just world,” Mr. Kuby said in an interview.
Perhaps the most lasting impact Mr. Stolar has had is the 1971 class action lawsuit he filed with a colleague. Jethro M. Eisensteinagainst the New York Police Department for its use of informants, agent provocateurs and wiretaps to monitor lawful political activity.
“We were both three years out of law school, completely inexperienced and had no idea what we were getting into,” Mr. Eisenstein, then a law professor at New York University, said in an interview.
The lawsuit was later joined by three other attorneys, including Mr. Siegel, and dragged on for years, eventually leading to a landmark settlement in 1985 known as the Handschu agreementUnder the terms of the law, the police must submit to a supervisory board that oversees surveillance.
Handschu’s case arose from reports of police spying that had been revealed during the sensational 1971 trial of the Panther 21, members of the Black Panther Party accused of plotting to blow up police stations. The courtroom drama lasted for months and ended in the acquittal of all the defendants.
The Panthers’ defense was led by the New York Law Commune, a radical legal firm of which Mr. Stolar was a member, as was his college classmate and romantic partner, Veronika Kraft. The commune made decisions collectively and paid members, including office staff, according to their needs.
As a member of the commune, Mr. Stolar helped defend the Camden 28, a group of mainly Roman Catholic war objectors who broke into the office of the Conscription Commission in 1971 to destroy documents.
Though the defendants admitted their actions, they were acquitted — an act, in part, of jury nullification that was seen as a referendum on the Vietnam War. Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. called it “one of the great trials of the 20th century.”
After the law society dissolved in the early 1970s, Mr. Stolar maintained a private practice from his office at 640 Broadway in Lower Manhattan. As president of the New York City chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, a progressive organization, he focused on the pro bono defense of activists arrested en masse during protests and acts of civil disobedience. When 1,800 protesters were arrested during the Republican National Convention in New York in 2004, Mr. Stolar handled more than 250 of the cases.
The tools Stolar developed for mass protester defense were used during the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests and the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.
After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when government authorities more than 1,000 people arrested, mainly Muslimsand held some of them for months without charge. Mr. Stolar represented several prisoners.
“I was a small voice in the wilderness saying, ‘We can’t do this, it’s un-American,’” Mr. Stolar recalled in an interview with Mr. Siegel that was printed in the program when he received a career award from the Lawyers Guild this spring.
In 2006, Mr. Stolar defended a Pakistani immigrant, Shahawar Matin Siraj, who was accused of plotting to blow up the Herald Square subway station. Mr. Stolar argued that his client had been entrapped by police officers and a paid informant who infiltrated Mr. Siraj’s Brooklyn mosque in violation of the Hanschu agreement. Mr. Siraj was convicted.
Martin Robert Stolar was born on April 2, 1943 in Syracuse, NY and grew up in Rochester, NY. He was the middle of three sons of Sig Stolar, the director of the Rochester YMHA, and Jesse (Scaum) Stolar.
He graduated from the University of Rochester in 1965 and received his law degree from New York University School of Law in 1968.
He and Mrs. Kraft had two daughters, born in 1974 and 1977, although the couple never legally married. They both believed that the government should not interfere in their private lives. Mrs. Kraft died of breast cancer in 1978.
Mr. Stolar married Ms. Chandler, a criminal defense attorney with Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem, in 1993.
She survives him, as do his daughters, Danya Henninger, a journalist in Philadelphia, and Tamar Kraft-Stolar, a director of the Women & Justice Project in New York; two grandchildren; and his brothers, Michael and Jeffrey.
While fresh out of law school, Mr. Stolar volunteered to represent indigent clients with the national service program VISTA, which sent him to Columbus, Ohio.
Before he was admitted to practice, the Ohio Bar asked a series of “character” questions that were a legacy of the McCarthy era. Mr. Solar refused, on First Amendment grounds, to answer whether he belonged to “an organization advocating the overthrow of the government of the United States by violence.”
After the Ohio Bar Association rejected him, Mr. Stolar filed a lawsuit and the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court. In a 5-to-4 rulingthe court struck down Ohio’s barrier. Writing for the majority, Justice Hugo Black said Ohio had no legitimate interest in examining “the broadest possible areas of belief and association protected from government invasion.”
The case set a precedent, preventing law groups from imposing a political litmus test. Mr. Stolar subsequently defended other law school graduates who faced challenges from “character committees” before they were allowed to practice.
“It has always been clear to me that I want to use my law degree to do political work,” Mr. Stolar once said. “I have never been a wealthy lawyer, but I have accumulated a lot of political capital over the years, which has made me wealthy.”
