Charter trial commences

Correction appended

The trial of Charter Club on charges of serving alcohol to minors and maintaining a nuisance began in Princeton Borough Municipal Court on Monday. No ruling has yet been reached, and the trial is scheduled to continue on April 30.

Each offense normally carries a sentence of up to six months in prison and a $1,000 fine. If the club is convicted of the charges, however, it is unlikely that any individual will go to jail.

Judge Bonnie Goldman called the court’s afternoon session to order at 1:30 p.m. in front of a crowd of DWI violators, an alleged marijuana dealer and a man who pleaded guilty to driving a taxi in the Borough without a license. Over the next few hours, the courtroom began to empty as Goldman dealt with each of the cases.

By 4 p.m., the crowd in the courtroom had dwindled: Several Charter members, club attorney Rocco Cipparone, Borough prosecutor Ken Lozier and several witnesses remained.

Witnesses were sequestered outside the courtroom to maintain the confidentiality of their testimony, in accordance with the requests of both lawyers.

The first witness to take the stand was Borough Police Patrolman Daniel Federico, who was patrolling the Borough from 6:30 p.m. on April 4, 2008, to 6:30 a.m. on April 5, the time period during which one of the instances of serving alcohol to minors allegedly took place.

Toward the middle of his shift, Federico said he received a call telling him to go to 79 Prospect Ave., the address of Charter.

“I observed an individual seated outside Charter Club, intoxicated and actively vomiting,” Federico said while he was testifying, seated facing the judge and between the two attorneys. Federico added that he could smell alcohol on the individual, whom he identified as David Freifeld ’11. Freifeld is also a senior advertising manager for The Daily Princetonian.

Federico said Freifeld was on the sidewalk between Charter and Prospect Avenue when he found him and added that, when he asked Freifeld where he had been drinking, Freifeld responded, “Right here.” Though he was only 19 years old at the time, Freifeld was never charged by the Borough for underage drinking.

Freifeld was later taken to the University Medical Center at Princeton, where Federico unsuccessfully attempted to make contact with him.

When Freifeld was brought to the stand, however, he said that he had no recollection of those events. He explained that he had gone to a room party in Cuyler Hall at around 10:30 p.m., where he drank beer and vodka, but he also said he could not remember most of the evening because he was intoxicated.

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“The last thing I remember was walking out the door,” Freifeld said, adding that he did not recall speaking to Federico, going to Charter or even planning to go there.

Those statements appeared to be contradicted by a videotaped statement Freifeld made several months ago to a Borough detective. Lozier moved to have the statement admitted as evidence, but Cipparone objected.

“His prior statements to a police officer are inadmissible,” Cipparone said, arguing that the videotape constituted hearsay since Freifeld maintained that he had been unable to remember a large part of that night and therefore had “no independent recollection of the events.”

Goldman overruled the objection, saying that videotaped statements are made to preserve truthful accounts of events, especially in the event that trials — like this one — take places many months after the events occur.

On a flat panel screen on the right side of the courtroom, the video showed Freifeld sitting across a small table from the detective, who asked the Rockefeller College sophomore where he went after he left the room party.

“We went out to Prospect Avenue, to the Charter Club,” Freifeld responded. He insisted in the video, however, that he had no memory of drinking anything at the club.

In response, the detective began to tell Freifeld that he was not going to get in trouble and that he was a “victim” in the case. Freifeld could not implicate himself, the detective said, but if it later emerged that Freifeld had lied in his statement, then he could be charged with obstruction of justice.

The detective asked again if Freifeld had been drinking at the club. “In probability,” Freifeld responded, explaining that he probably played drinking games at the club but that he had no memory of doing so himself.

Cipparone then objected to several sections of the tape similar to that one, saying that, since Freifeld could not recall what happened at the club himself, his statements were the result of guessing or extrapolations from the statements of his friends. Either way, the bulk of it was hearsay, Cipparone explained, and therefore it deserved to be stricken from the court record.

This time, Goldman granted Cipparone a continuing objection — that anything else in the tape the judge ruled hearsay would be stricken from the record.

Cipparone then encouraged Freifeld to contextualize his remarks in the tape, asking if the detective’s statements about obstruction of justice, a charge that the detective had said would follow Freifeld around for the rest of his life, had scared him. Freifeld said that they did.

Cipparone followed up by asking whether Freifeld had been “hedging [his] bets” by making statements he was not completely sure of in the video. Freifeld said that he had.

Lozier countered, saying that before the detective had even mentioned the possibility of obstruction of justice charges, Freifeld had already said he had been at Charter — a statement that differed from his remarks on the stand.

Lozier then called Federico to the stand again, making him reaffirm that Freifeld had indeed told him that he had been drinking “right here” that night. Cipparone pointed out that Freifeld had been sitting on the sidewalk along Prospect Avenue, and not on Charter property, when he made that statement.

The trial is set to continue on April 30. Kara Murphy ’09 and Kelsey Stallings ’09, who attended the court session but were not called to the stand, are among those that may still be called to the stand. Paige Schmidt ’08 poured beer on Murphy, allegedly while they were both on Charter premises, in December 2007. Murphy then struck Schmidt, who called the police.

The Borough originally charged former club president Will Scharf ’08 in December 2007, but those charges were dropped the next month. Cipparone explained last fall that the prosecutor was able to bring charges stemming from the incident a second time because the current charges are against the club as a whole.

While Scharf announced in March 2008 his intention to sue the Borough, he has not yet filed a civil suit.

Correction:

An earlier version of this article stated that Will Scharf '08 was charged by the Borough in February 2008. In fact, he was charged in December 2007.