Martin R. Stoller, the famed civil rights lawyer who represented anti-war activists and prisoners who staged an uprising at Attica Prison in the early 1970s and filed a landmark lawsuit to stop the New York Police Department from spying on left-wing activists, died in Manhattan on July 1. He was 81 years old.
His wife, Elsie Chandler, said her husband suffered heart failure while waiting for surgery on a broken hip and died in hospital.
Stoller was part of a generation of idealistic lawyers who, inspired by the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, left high-paying careers to dedicate their expertise to the cause of social justice.
“His job was not just to protect the needy but to advance social causes,” said Franklin Siegel, a distinguished lecturer at the City University of New York School of Law who knew Mr. Stoller for nearly 60 years.
While the righteous fervor of others in the so-called movement has waned over the years, Stoller's fervor has not waned; if anything, it has grown more intense.
In the weeks before his death, he had participated in organized conference calls to defend Columbia University students arrested while protesting the Gaza war, and he also advised on the defense of climate change protesters arrested after targeting Wall Street banks for funding fossil fuel projects.
Ron Kuby, a left-leaning lawyer and talk radio host, shared a text message he received from an environmental activist who was in the Manhattan courtroom on the day Stoller died to watch a case of more than 100 protesters.
As the news spread, activists texted Kuby: “People who knew Marty” were crying, while people who didn't know him “wondered why all their lawyers were crying.”
“Marty was one of the last of a generation of great movement lawyers who fought for decades on the side of demonstrators, protesters and dissenters for a more just world,” Kuby said in an interview.
Perhaps Stoller's most lasting impact was the 1971 class action lawsuit he co-sponsored with colleague Jethro M. Eisenstein against the New York Police Department's use of informants, provocateurs and wiretaps to monitor legitimate political activity.
“We were both three years out of law school and had no idea what we were getting into,” Eisenstein, then a professor at New York University's School of Law, recalled in an interview.
The suit, which was later joined by three other lawyers, including Siegel, dragged on for years, eventually culminating in a landmark settlement in 1985 known as the Hanshew Agreement, which required police to follow the directions of an oversight committee.
The Hanshew case arose from records of police espionage that emerged during the sensational 1971 trial of Panther 21, members of the Black Panther Party who were accused of plotting to blow up a police station. The courtroom drama dragged on for months and ended with the acquittal of all defendants.
The Panthers' legal team was run by a radical law firm called the New York Law Commune, of which both Stoller and his law school classmate and girlfriend, Veronica Kraft, were members. The commune made decisions collectively and paid its members, including clerical staff, as needed.
As part of the commune, Mr. Stohler helped defend the Camden 28, a group of mostly Roman Catholic anti-war activists who broke into a Draft Service office and destroyed records in 1971.
The defendants admitted to their actions but were acquitted. It was partly a jury acquittal and 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 collective dissolved in the early 1970s, Mr. Stohler practiced in private practice from an office at 640 Broadway in Lower Manhattan. As president of the New York chapter of the progressive group, the National Lawyers Guild, he focused on pro bono defense of activists caught in mass arrests at protests and acts of civil disobedience. When New York hosted the Republican National Convention in 2004, in which 1,800 demonstrators were arrested, Mr. Stohler handled more than 250 cases.
The tools Stoller developed for the collective defense of protesters became templates used during the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011 and the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, government authorities rounded up more than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, and held some of them for months without charge, but Stoler represented several of the detainees.
“I was a little voice in the wilderness crying out, 'I can't do this, it's un-American,'” Stoller recalled in an interview with Siegel included in a program when he received a lifetime achievement award from the Bar Association this spring.
In 2006, Mr. Stoler represented Shahawar Matin Shirazi, a Pakistani immigrant accused of plotting to blow up the Herald Square subway station. Mr. Stoler argued that his client had been entrapped by police intelligence and a paid informant who had infiltrated Mr. Shirazi's mosque in Brooklyn, a violation of the Hanschutz Accords. Mr. Shirazi was convicted.
Martin Robert Stoller was born April 2, 1943, in Syracuse, New York, and grew up in Rochester, New York. He was the middle of three sons of Sig Stoller, director of the Rochester YMHA, and Jesse (Staum) Stoller.
He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Rochester in 1965 and his law degree from New York University School of Law in 1968.
He and Kraft had two daughters, born in 1974 and 1977, but they were not legally married. Both believed the government should not interfere in their private lives. Kraft died of breast cancer in 1986.
Stoler married Chandler, a criminal lawyer with the Harlem Neighborhood Bar Association, in 1993.
She is survived by her daughters, Danya Henninger, a journalist in Philadelphia, and Tamar Kraft Stoller, director of the Women and Justice Project in New York, two grandchildren, and brothers Michael and Jeffrey.
Fresh out of law school, Stoler volunteered to represent indigent clients through the national service program VISTA, which deployed him to Columbus, Ohio.
Before admitting him to practice law, the Ohio State Bar asked him a series of “character” questions, a holdover from the McCarthy era, and he refused to answer a question about whether he belonged to “any organization advocating the armed overthrow of the Government of the United States” on First Amendment grounds.
After the Ohio Bar dismissed Stoller's complaint, he sued and the case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which overturned the Ohio Bar's complaint in a 5-4 decision. Justice Hugo Black wrote in his majority opinion that Ohio had no legitimate right to investigate “so broad an area of ​​faith and association protected from government intrusion.”
The case set a precedent limiting bar associations' ability to impose political litmus tests, and Stoller went on to represent other law school graduates who were challenged by “character committees” before being allowed to practice law.
“It was always clear to me that I wanted to use my law degree to go into politics,” Stoller once said. “I wasn't a wealthy lawyer, but I gained a lot of political capital over the years that made me wealthy.”
