Teacher’s Sex Trial Focuses on Etiquette Questions

Should teachers offer advice on what color underwear is the right color for their students? Should students give roses to their teachers on Valentine’s Day?

A criminal trial is not normally the place where you might expect to hear questions worthy of consideration by Miss Manners.

But a Manhattan jury was asked to ponder such etiquette questions on Thursday — to the evident amusement of some of them — in the statutory rape trial of Lina Sinha, the East Side private school principal and teacher accused of having sex with two of her junior high school students.

On the witness stand was Olivia Jones, a former assistant pre-kindergarten and French teacher for nine months in 2002 at the Montessori School of New York, where Ms. Sinha was the principal.

Ms. Jones, now 28, contacted the Manhattan district attorney’s office in October, 2005, after reading a newspaper account of Ms. Sinha’s arrest on statutory rape charges, to float the name of a second possible victim, according to earlier testimony from a detective.

The boy she named has indeed come to be identified by prosecutors as the second of two victims. Ms. Sinha, 40, denies the charges but admits to an adult romance gone bad with the first accuser, who is now 24 and a New York City police officer. The second boy, now 19, is a convicted drug dealer, who testified that he had sex with Ms. Sinha when he was 12 and enjoyed it.

Ms. Jones told the jury why she wondered about the relationship between the second boy and Ms. Sinha.

Generally speaking, she said, he was kind of a teacher’s pet, although she never learned his last name.

Once, she said, she saw Ms. Sinha and the boy step off the school elevator looking rumpled. “They both to me looked like they had just woken up,” she said, and the boy’s “shirt was untucked.”

Another time, she testified, she overheard Ms. Sinha chiding the boy for wearing black underwear with white slacks. The boy, she said, looked mortified by this intimate sartorial advice. “He blushed,” she said. “He looked down at the ground and seemed noticeably embarrassed.”

On Valentine’s Day, she testified, she found it “strange” to see the boy bring his principal a dozen red roses. “She seemed very pleased,” Ms. Jones said, adding that no other students gave the teachers flowers.

Toward the end of the school year she peered through the plate glass window of Ms. Sinha’s office and saw the boy crying, she testified.

“I never saw him again,” she concluded portentously, seeming to corroborate the district attorney’s account that Ms. Sinha and the boy had a painful romantic breakup at this time.

On cross examination, Ms. Sinha’s lawyer, Gerald L. Shargel, addressed her points one by one.

Did she have any idea why the boy had left the school? No, she said. This left the jury to recall the boy’s mother testifying that she pulled him out of Montessori and other schools because he was running with a bad crowd, doing graffiti and later selling drugs.

If other students did not give teachers flowers for Valentine’s Day, did they at least give them chocolates or other gifts? “Sure,” Ms. Jones replied.

When the boy stepped off the elevator with Ms. Sinha, was his shirt out of his pants? “That’s right,” Ms. Jones replied. Had she ever seen him look that way at other times, perhaps when they both testified before the grand jury?

Ms. Jones said she had not. That left the jury to think back to the way he looked after testifying during the current trial, a few days ago.

He left the witness box and stepped out outside the red velvet rope that separates the jury from the spectators.

Heaving a deep sigh — as if relieved to be out of a stressful situation — he yanked the shirttails of his blue Oxford shirt out of the waistband of his khaki pants and ambled away.