Metro

Defense in Dershowitz hit-and-run trial claims case only brought because of victim’s family connections

A Manhattan jury will begin day two of deliberations tomorrow in the hit-and-run trial of the postal worker who fatally drove over the bicycling sister-in-law of O.J. Simpson Dream Team lawyer Alan Dershowitz in Chelsea last summer.

The weak case was only brought because victim Marilyn Dershowitz, 68, herself a lawyer, belonged to the powerful legal family, defense lawyer John Arlia told jurors this morning in closing arguments. Jurors retired for the day after an afternoon of deliberations.

“If the roles were reversed and Mrs. Dershowitz were the driver, the NYCounty District Attorney would never charge Mrs. Dershowitz with a crime,” the lawyer claimed.

“He simply did not know he was involved,” the lawyer said of driver Ian Clement, a 64-year-old father of two.

Both sides agree that Dershowitz had been bicycling on W. 29th Street a minute behind her husband Nathan — also a Dream Team lawyer, only behind the scenes — and fell while negotiating a narrow space between Clement’s seven-ton truck and a parked postal trailer.

Clement told jurors last week that he felt a “bump” as he unwittingly rode over the woman and her bike with his rear right tire, and immediately pulled to the side, as supported by surveillance video. He saw traffic stopped through his rearview mirror, and heard horns honking behind him, he had testified.

But after a total of more than two minutes of waiting inside his cab, no one approached his vehicle, and he drove off believing he was uninvolved, Arlia told jurors, noting that post-9/11, postal drivers have been told not to abandon their vehicles on the street for fear of thieves who could use a mail truck as camouflage for terrorism.

“No one rushed to him and said Mr. Clement, you’re involved. So naturally he thought that he was not involved,” the lawyer told jurors, implying his client was too “simple” to grasp what was really going on.

“Do you think this working man would have left injured and dying Marilyn Dershowitz on the street if he knew?” Arlia asked jurors.

To win a conviction, prosecutors must convince the jury that Clement knew or reasonably should have known that he had been involved in an accident — a high standard the defense lawyer likened to, “willful blindness.”

But prosecutor Erin LaFarge told jurors that willful blindness is precisely what the evidence shows Clement displayed in not getting out of his vehicle to investigate before driving away from the mortally injured woman.

It would be “ridiculous,” she told jurors, to have a hit-and-run law where if you willfully don’t assess the situation, you can remain ignorant of whether there’s been an accident, and thus get away with it, she said.

Surveillance video clearly shows Clement’s truck rocking side-to-side as it runs the woman over, then pulling over to the left, LaFarge noted as the tape rolled on a courtroom television screen.

“How do we know that he knows he has just been in an accident? Because the next thing he does is he stops his truck on the left and he turns on his hazard lights,” she told jurors.

“He stops immediately because he felt the crunch of a human body on a bicycle under his rear tires. It’s not a small thing ladies and gentlemen. It’s not a pothole.”

A court officer then brought into the courtroom the victim’s silver bicycle, it’s seat and rear end bent.

“This is the object he had to ride over with an actual person sitting on top,” the prosecutor told jurors. “It’s not a pothole. It’s not a garbage pail lid. It’s not a curb. He knew.”

Clement faces a maximum sentence of seven years prison if convicted.