Frederic Kernochan (August 12, 1876 – January 9, 1937) was an American soldier and lawyer who served as Chief Justice of the Court of Special Sessions.
[1] He was the son of attorney J. Frederic Kernochan and the former Mary Stuart Whitney (1849–1922), who were both prominent in New York society.
[2][10][11] After attending St. Mark's School, Kernochan graduated from Yale University with the class of 1898 (where he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon and Skull and Bones),[12][13] and then attended New York Law School, where he graduated in 1901, the same year he was admitted to the New York bar.
[16] In December of the same year, the then unmarried Kernochan was "drawn into a declaration yesterday in the Harlem Police Court that, so far as he personally was concerned, the preponderance of evidence being against matrimony, he proposed to continue to keep out of it.
"[17] In 1911, Kernochan decided "in the West Side Court, without hearing any witnesses, the Russian ballet performance" that was at "the Winter Garden was not of a nature to call for police interference and refused to issue a summons.
Kernochan interrogated him in his prison cell in the Dade County Courthouse jail,[23] where Zangara confessed, stating: "I have the gun in my hand.
His Battery was assigned a position 2 miles north of Ponce until they were ordered home aboard the Mississippi, arriving in New Jersey on September 10, 1898.
[31] Together, they lived at 42 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and, later, 4 East 95th Street, were the parents of: Kernochan died of pleural pneumonia on January 9, 1937, aged 60, at Tuxedo Park, New York.