Researchers Still Await Trial, One Year After Indictments

Dr. Leon D. Sabath '50 was indicted one year ago today on charges stemming from fetal research he performed at Boston City Hospital, and while he still awaits trial, he said yesterday that the manslaughter conviction of Dr. Kenneth C. Edelin has convinced him that one cannot predict what will happen in the courts.

Sabath--a former associate professor of Medicine at the Medical School--and Dr. Leonard D. Berman, assistant professor of Pathology, are the two Harvard doctors who were indicted April 11, 1974, and whose defense costs have been assumed by the University.

Sabath, Berman, and two other since-indicted experimenters had worked at Boston City Hospital on a paper regarding the effects on the fetus of substitutes for penicillin administered to the mother.

"Grave Robbers"

When their study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in June 1973, it prompted a lengthy investigation by the Suffolk County district attorney's staff that in turn produced the indictments, alleging "illegal transportation" of dead human tissue in citing a 19th century statute initially aimed at grave-robbers.

The same Boston grand jury turned over the Edelin manslaughter indictment on April 11, and although Edelin was convicted in February--for the death of a fetus following a legal abortion--the experimenters' case is only now coming to the county's superior criminal court.

Suffolk Associate Justice John J. McNaught was named to the case last month, and defense attornies said yesterday that McNaught will meet within two weeks with both sides to set a schedule for hearing pre trial motions.

Schedule Uncertain

Garrett H. Byrne, the district attorney, said yesterday that only when he knows that schedule will be decide who will prosecute the case.

Newman A. Flanagan, assistant district attorney and the man who successfully argued the Edelin case, said at the time of that verdict that he would not undertake the experimenters' case although he had been active in it before.

However, Neil L. Chayet '57, attorney for defendant Dr. David Charles, said last night that he would be suprised if Flanagan does not prosecute the case.

The indictments are significant because they challenge methods that both the Boston City Department of Health and Hospitals and Harvard Medical School have officially endorsed as acceptable.

sabath, now it professor of Medicine at the University of Minnesota, said yesterday that although the Edelin case may have been more significant to prosecutors because it involved homocide, his indictment has been more significant to the medical community, in putting a damper on fetal research.

The tissue studied in the research was obtained after therapeutic abortions.

He said that he hopes--in spite of what he said was the unpredictability of the legal process--that the case will be thrown out on one of the motions for dismissal filed by defense attornies last August.

Chayet said that dismissal motions will probably be heard "in a couple of months."

The defense argues in one of these motions that the indictments are "vague" and fail to inform the defendants of what they allegedly did wrong. Another motion says that it would be against the interests of the state to proscribe the type of practice for which the investigative team was indicted.

Kenneth A. Cohen '67, one of Sabath's lawyers, said yesterday that the defense will move for a change of venue to a county other than Suffolk, but that citing the jury's decision in the Edelin ease might not be part of the argument.

Edelin has charged since his conviction that the jurors were from an area where anti-abortion sentiment ultimately prejudiced their decision.

In the fall, Edelin's defense and the doctors' attornies commissioned a poll of the views on abortion of the Suffolk County jury pool but Cohen declined yesterday to commment on whether that poll would be cited in a motion for change of venue.

Cohen said that the delay in the prosecution of the experimenters' case is due partially to attornies' decision "to wait and watch the Edelin decision," and that a motion to dismiss based on a defendant's right to a "speedy trial" would thus probably be out of order.

Byrne refused to comment yesterday on whether the delay was due to an effort by the prosecution to finish with the Edelin case before proceeding with the other medical indictments.

The defendants not associated with Harvard are Charles and Dr. Agnetta Phillipson. Only Phillipson, a Swedish citizen and resident, has not retained counsel, although Sabath said yesterday that she has told him she will return to the United States if the case comes to trial