The Catterson Affair

It took 65 days for Suffolk County District Attorney James M. Catterson Jr. to decide that no charges should be filed against Martha Stewart for reportedly pinning Harry Macklowe's landscaper against a gate with her Chevy Suburban. While the D.A.'s opinion that the root cause of the incident - the longstanding hostility between Ms. Stewart and her neighbor Mr. Macklowe - was best settled in civil court, his involvement in the case at all is suspect.

That Matthew J. Munnich, the landscaper, should have been caught, literally, between two combative neighbors was unfortunate and unfair. Ms. Stewart's vehicular maneuver seemed by most accounts to be as East Hampton Village Police Chief Glen Stonemetz characterized it at the start: unintentional, but nonetheless reckless. In the chief's opinion, a misdemeanor charge, no more (but no less), was warranted.

What, then, prompted Mr. Catterson to go to the extreme of having his senior staff, himself included, review Mr. Munnich's complaint? A statement from his office announces the decision that "the confrontation between Ms. Stewart and Mr. Munnich . . . does not warrant arrest and criminal prosecution." It also states that "celebrity status alone cannot be considered a relevant factor in deciding whether or not to prosecute in a particular case."

Exactly. The statement begs the issue, which is that a misdemeanor charge stemming from an incident such as this never would have reached the District's Attorney's desk if it weren't for the fact that Ms. Stewart is a celebrity.

The yearlong ugliness between the Georgica Close Road neighbors has been the subject of debate as much on the checkout line at local delis as in the national tabloid news. Undoubtedly, the talk is fueled by the love-to-hate-them notoriety of the combatants - Ms. Stewart, the doyenne of domesticity whose image is often spoofed, and Mr. Macklowe, the Manhattan real estate developer, known for tearing down buildings (and building a fence) in the middle of the night.

Mr. Catterson was quoted in The Star late last month saying it was precisely the "notoriety" of Ms. Stewart and Mr. Macklowe that prompted him not to "rush to judgment and cause a spectacle."

His office gave a similar response to questions about the extraordinary investigation into a far more serious matter, the 1995 rape of a Southampton College student by Kerry Kotler, a Montauk fisherman convicted just this month. Mr. Kotler made national news after D.N.A. evidence helped clear him of an earlier rape, for which he had spent 11 years in prison. That notoriety triggered an eight-month, around-the-clock effort by up to 75 detectives, a helicopter, and K-9 units.

The D.A.'s office declined to put a price on that effort, though millions would be a safe estimate. The costs of the two-month investigation into the Martha Stewart incident can be tallied by a different measure - public confidence.

Mr. Catterson's critics charge that the D.A. - who is, not so incidentally, running for re-election this year, as he was when Mr. Kotler was under investigation - weighed public reaction in both high-profile matters and did what he thought would be politically advantageous. The voters, undoubtedly, will tell us in November if he was right.