NEW JERSEY
NJ.com
By MaryAnn Spoto | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
on April 15, 2015
TRENTON — Jurors began deliberating Wednesday afternoon in the trial of a Lakewood rabbi and three others accused of kidnapping Orthodox Jewish men and forcing them to grant their wives religious divorces.
After hearing one last summation from one of the four defense attorneys and rebuttal from the prosecution,the jury of six men and six women who sat through eight weeks of testimony in the federal kidnapping conspiracy trial of Rabbi Mendel Epstein began discussions shortly before 3 p.m.
Charged along with Epstein are his son, David “Ari” Epstein and rabbis Jay Goldstein and Binyamin Stimler, whom federal prosecutors contend terrorized and tortured men between 2009 and 2013 into giving their wives religious divorces, known as gets.
The four defendants were arrested on Oct. 9, 2013, at a warehouse in Edison where they allegedly planned to ambush a husband they were told refused to give his wife a divorce.
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