James Fitzgerald (American jurist, born 1851)

In 1907, Fitzgerald presided over the first trial of Harry K. Thaw, who was accused of murder.^[6] Thaw was the mentally unstable heir of a railroad baron, and he had killed a renowned architect, Stanford White, who had previously sexually assaulted Thaw's wife, Evelyn Nesbit, who was a famous fashion model and chorus girl. The trial was the subject of intense public interest and was highly sensationalized in the press, becoming one of the earliest examples of the "trial of the century" phenomenon.^[7] Fitzgerald ordered the jury to be sequestered, which was a highly unusual step at the time. In a contemporaneous report, the New York Times could only identify one specific previous case in which this had occurred.^[6][8] Fitzgerald had to declare a mistrial when the jury was unable to agree on a verdict. After a second trial in 1908 (under a different judge) ended with verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity and Thaw was incarcerated in a state hospital for the criminally insane but continued to pursue legal challenges to his incarceration, Fitzgerald suffered a nervous breakdown in 1911 that was attributed to the strain of the trial.^[1]

Fitzgerald died on December 17, 1922, at his home at 34 Hamilton Terrace, in Manhattan of heart disease^[1] and was buried at the Calvary Cemetery in Queens.^[9]