Briefs

THE LONG WAIT

One spring night in 1937, soon after Isidore Zimmerman of New York City had received a scholarship to attend Columbia University, his mother told him that the police wanted to talk to him. He reported to the local precinct and then quickly found himself in jail. One year later, Zimmerman and four other youths were sentenced to death for the first-degree murder of a police detective.

All along, Zimmerman insisted that he was innocent. Then just two hours before Zimmerman was to be executed in Sing Sing's electric chair, Governor Herbert Lehman commuted his death sentence. Zimmerman went on to become a celebrated jailhouse lawyer, and in 1962, after New York State's highest court ruled that he had been the victim of perjured testimony, he was set free. Total time served: nearly 25 years.

Since the prosecutor had known that the testimony was false, Zimmerman believed that New York should compensate hIn for wrongful imprisonment. The doctrine of sovereign immunity bars most such suits against a state, so Zimmerman pressed the New York legislature to pass a special law allowing him to sue. Three times the legislators voted the bill, and three times then Governor Nelson Rockefeller vetoed it. Last week Governor Hugh Carey signed the fourth bill. Lawyers on both sides agree that Zimmerman is likely to win his case. The only question is whether he will be awarded as much as the $10 million he is seeking. Whatever he gets, the money will be welcome to Zimmerman, 63, who now works as a doorman at a Manhattan apartment house.

ROPING RAPISTS

Very few of the 76,000 annual rape cases in the U.S. end in conviction. One reason is the frequent lack of evidence. But Illinois prosecutors may have a remedy.

Emergency room staffs in at least 220 of the state's 300 hospitals now use the Vitullo Evidence Collection Kit, named after Louis Vitullo, a former Chicago police sergeant who helped devise it. The kit comes in a book-size cardboard box and includes slides, evidence bags and labels. Nurses and doctors use the contents to collect blood samples, hairs, fingernail scrapings and bodily smears. While it is still too early to gauge the success of the kit, convictions were obtained in three early test cases in which it was used. Yet a lack of funds for the kits, which cost $5.25 each, may stop their national distribution. Much of the start-up money for the Illinois program came from the federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, which in 1980 became a victim of Washington budget cuts. The program has also lost its other original benefactor: the Playboy Foundation.

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