CAMDEN, N.J. — A judge presiding over the trial of a New Jersey rabbi charged with arranging the murder of his wife declared a mistrial Tuesday after the jury failed to reach a verdict in more than seven days of deliberations.

"At this point, I have no intention of asking you to resume deliberations. You have done all that you could possibly do, and then some," Camden County, N.J., Judge Linda Baxter told the jury. "The jury I find is at a complete standstill, you are deadlocked, and no further amount of time could be productive."

Fred Neulander, a once respected clergyman who started his own congregation in Cherry Hill, N.J. outside Philadelphia, faced death if convicted of the most serious charge against him, capital murder. He smiled and chatted briefly with his attorney as his case, which consumed more than three months including jury selection, was declared a mistrial.

Neulander, 60, was accused of offering two hitmen, Leonard Jenoff and Paul Michael Daniels, $30,000 to kill his wife, Carol Neulander, who was found beaten to death on the living room floor of her Cherry Hill home on November 1, 1994.

Three times during more than 43 hours of deliberation the jury indicated that it might be deadlocked. The first notice, a note which came after only two hours of deliberations, merely asked what might happen if jurors could not agree on the charges facing the rabbi. Judge Baxter dismissed this note out of hand, saying that the jury had not had sufficient time to review the 40 witnesses and more than 60 pieces of evidence presented during the trial.

A second note, which came after five days and 31 hours of deliberations, said that the jury had reached a standstill. The next day, however, another note indicated that the jury wished to have more time to deliberate, and wanted readbacks of the testimony from a number of key witnesses, including portions of testimony from the confessed hitman.

The final note, which came Tuesday around 4 p.m. ET, again indicated the jury was deadlocked, prompting Judge Baxter to call a mistrial.

Carol Neulander

The rabbi, who built the successful M'Kor Shalom synagogue from a grass-roots congregation in 1974 to a burgeoning, 900-family operation when he stepped down from his post in 1995, could have faced death by lethal injection if convicted. New Jersey has not executed an inmate since 1963.

Neulander's defense lawyers had a mixed reaction to the mistrial. "We're certainly pleased our client was not convicted, we're disappointed that he wasn't cleared," Jeff Zucker told Court TV after the mistrial was declared Tuesday.

Zucker and his partner, Dennis Wixted, said that there would be no plea bargains under any circumstances, and that they planned to make a request Wednesday to the judge asking her to schedule a hearing for bail on Friday. The lawyers will argue that their client, who has been held without bail for 17 months in the Camden County Correctional Facility, deserves to be released after the jury in this case was not fully convinced by the state's case.

During the trial Wixted admitted that his client was "a miserable little piece of dung," but stressed throughout the trial that "it's a long, long way from there to conspiracy to commit a murder."

The defense focused their three-day case on discrediting Jenoff, the main link between Neulander and his wife's death, saying the licensed private investigator invented the murder conspiracy to cover up a botched robbery attempt on Carol Neulander, who sometimes brought home $5,000 to $20,000 in cash from her successful cake-baking business.

The lawyers called two jailhouse snitches who testified that Jenoff, despite what he told police, told them in the Camden County Correctional Facility that the rabbi had nothing to do with the murder.

Neulander spent two days on the stand trying to explain Jenoff's claims, as well as circumstantial evidence presented by the state that could have implicated him in the conspiracy. The rabbi stayed true to his basic claim — that he had nothing to do with his wife's death — but his testimony was weakened on cross-examination.

The rabbi was at his most vulnerable when he waffled in explaining an eloquently-penned letter that he wrote to Soncini on January 4, 1995, two months after his wife's death and after he and his mistress had rekindled their sexual relationship.

At first, Neulander said he was being sincere when he expressed his love for the radio host, but during his second day under cross-examination by Camden County First Assistant Prosecutor James Lynch, he testified that he was only trying to manipulate Soncini into continuing their physical relationship.

Lynch also forced the defendant to admit that at first he cared more about concealing his affair than solving his wife's murder.

"I'm innocent," Neulander insisted, prodded by the prosecutor. "You're an innocent man with a bad memory, sir?" Lynch asked.

"I don't have a perfect memory and I don't have perfect answers," Neulander said.

Neulander also told the jury that he and his wife had an "open marriage," a policy he apparently took full advantage of, admitting to carrying on as many as two concurrent extramarital affairs at one point.

During the trial, Lynch used 21 witnesses — including Neulander's children, Rebecca and Matthew Neulander, his wife's confessed killers, and his mistress, Soncini — to portray the rabbi as a "hollow man" whose arrogance and lust led him to recruit Jenoff in 1994 to kill his wife.

Lynch argued that Neulander was under pressure from Soncini, a one-time radio host in Philadelphia, who testified she threatened to leave him if he didn't become a single man by the end of 1994, to end his marriage.

After the mistrial decision, Camden County prosecutor Lee Solomon complimented Lynch, his first assistant prosecutor, for his work on the case, and added that his team remains firm in its belief that Neulander should stand trial for his wife's murder and plans to pursue another trial.

"There's nothing in my mind that has changed in this case," Solomon said. "We'll proceed as we did before."