Cyrus R. Vance Jr.’s third and final term as Manhattan district attorney is ending, but his investigation into former President Donald J. Trump goes on.
Much of the furniture had been hauled away. The walls were stripped bare. And the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., sat on a brown leather couch in his eighth-floor office earlier this month, considering the last big question before him as his term neared its end: Would he decide whether to charge Donald J. Trump with a crime?
“I am committed to moving the case as far along in the decision-making as I can while I’m here,” he said.
As Mr. Vance, 67, leaves office at the end of this week, that inquiry is still unresolved. He will hand the investigation over to his successor, Alvin Bragg.
A Democrat who was only the fourth district attorney to hold the office in nearly 80 years, Mr. Vance chose not to seek re-election this year. He said he had promised his family he would not run again. “Twelve years is a long time to hold an office this volatile,” he said, adding, “It was time for me to write a new chapter in my life.”
The fate of the Trump inquiry, which could result in the first indictment of an American president in history, will help shape the public understanding of Mr. Vance’s tenure.
Asked how he might deal with criticism if the case is not resolved to people’s liking, Mr. Vance, who otherwise maintained a low-key congeniality during two recent interviews, grew animated.
“Look, I’ve been criticized for a lot,” he said. “Do I like it? No. But do I have to put it all in perspective? Yeah. And if you don’t put it in perspective, you’ll shoot yourself. Because people are passionate and they’re angry, and people have only gotten more divided and more angry in the last five or six years than they ever were before.”
Before he took office in 2010, Mr. Vance had worked as a prosecutor for his predecessor, Robert M. Morgenthau, a titan of New York City law enforcement. Mr. Morgenthau, who died in 2019, made his reputation as a crime-fighter when prosecutors were still venerated figures.
Mr. Vance was handed a more complex task: to help reimagine the prosecutor’s role as crime dropped to record lows and the inequities of the justice system loomed larger than ever before.
“I was inheriting an office that was very much a 20th-century operation in terms of its systems and its practices and its policies,” he said. “It was, ‘How many trials did you have?’ It was, ‘How aggressive can you be?’”
Mr. Vance instituted a less sweeping, more precise approach to addressing gang and gun violence. He stopped prosecuting certain low-level misdemeanors, including marijuana possession, fare evasion and, earlier this year, prostitution.
He moved his office into the digital age, using data to inform decisions. He started a cybercrime unit and used hundreds of millions of dollars from settlements with big banks to fund programs that he argued would make the city safer.
Mr. Vance’s close advisers say he sowed the seeds of a more progressive method of prosecution.
“Law enforcement was just starting to change, and Vance came in as that was happening and really was a leader in shaping that conversation,” said Karen Friedman Agnifilo, a former deputy to Mr. Vance.
While some of Mr. Vance’s ideas seemed cutting-edge in 2010, he was overtaken in his appetite for change by his peers in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago and nearby in Brooklyn, where elected prosecutors enacted more lenient policies, and in some cases spoke more forcefully about the harms of harsh prosecution.
“As we progressed in how we think about the best ways to keep communities safe and how to rethink the way prosecution works, he and his office simply could not keep up,” said Janos Marton, who fought to reduce incarceration in New York and briefly competed in the race to succeed Mr. Vance. “That’s really the story of his tenure.”
Mr. Vance’s successor, Mr. Bragg, is a former federal prosecutor. The plans Mr. Bragg has committed to, which include lengthening the list of low-level crimes that will not be prosecuted and placing a renewed focus on accountability for law enforcement, put him in line with other newly elected prosecutors.
Mr. Vance said he is hopeful about Mr. Bragg’s policies but is not convinced that they will be effective in reducing crime, particularly in the face of a sharp rise in murders and shootings that began last summer.
“Alvin Bragg is a smart, experienced former prosecutor who I believe cares about public safety as much as anybody,” he said. “It remains to be seen whether going leaps and bounds further than we have gone in our time will result in continued lower crime rates.”
Mr. Vance’s conviction integrity unit, his critics say, exemplifies his strengths and failings. Set up in 2010, it was one of the first such units in the country. It helped the office assess new cases, leading to dozens of post-arrest dismissals. And in November, its work led to the exoneration of two men who had spent 20 years in prison for the 1965 murder of Malcolm X.
But the unit has been criticized for having done far less than it could have. Mr. Bragg, while campaigning in the Democratic primary, said it appeared to exist “in name only” and vowed to start a new one explicitly devoted to freeing the wrongfully convicted.
Mr. Bragg will be the first Black Manhattan district attorney, and critics of the office hope he will address the harms they say it does to Black people, who continue to be prosecuted disproportionately. Public defenders who faced Mr. Vance’s prosecutors and assistant district attorneys who worked for him said in interviews that his office still treated defendants harshly.
Jarvis Idowu, a three-year veteran of the office who helped draft its policy to stop prosecuting fare evasion, said that the leadership there “talked a lot about how important diversity was.”
But, he said, all the talk did not result in changes to the office’s policies that were informed by those diverse perspectives. Mr. Idowu, who is Black, said he left the office in 2018 after being asked to seek a yearslong prison sentence for a man in his 20s who had used forged credit cards to buy food, and to charge a homeless man stealing salmon from a grocery store with a felony. Both men were Black.
Mr. Vance noted that he had invited the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit focused on criminal justice reform, to examine his office’s record on racial disparities in prosecution soon after taking office. The institute found race was a major factor at nearly every stage of Manhattan’s criminal process.
“I don’t pretend that I’m the most progressive prosecutor on race issues, but it is something that we never ignored,” Mr. Vance said. “Could we have done better? I think we could have done better.”
Much discussion of Mr. Vance has focused on his most high-profile cases. Some decisions drew criticism early in his tenure. A 2011 sexual assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, was dropped after Mr. Vance’s prosecutors questioned the victim’s story.
He did not charge two of Mr. Trump’s children in 2012, or Harvey Weinstein in 2015, and was criticized for dealing leniently with the disgraced gynecologist Robert Hadden, who was accused of sexually abusing nearly 20 women, but avoided any prison time.
Mr. Vance later found success in high-stakes cases. He won a conviction of Mr. Weinstein in 2020, which Mr. Weinstein is appealing. He also convicted the murderer of Etan Patz, a boy who disappeared on his way to school in 1979. His office is again investigating Mr. Hadden, who has also been charged with federal crimes.
Mr. Vance, like Mr. Morgenthau before him, has close familial ties to the highest echelons of American government. His father, Cyrus R. Vance Sr., was a U.S. secretary of state under President Jimmy Carter. Early in Mr. Trump’s administration, Mr. Vance expressed concern that the president was undercutting the rule of law, and his yearslong investigation into Mr. Trump — as well as inquiries into associates who were pardoned by the president in Mr. Trump’s final weeks in office — reflects that concern.
In 2019, Mr. Trump’s lawyers fought a subpoena demanding eight years of the president’s personal and corporate tax returns, beginning an extended legal battle between the president and the district attorney and delaying the investigation for more than a year.
Ultimately, Mr. Vance won the battle. The Supreme Court decided in his favor, twice, most recently in February, victories he called a “high-water mark” in the office’s work. This summer, he indicted Mr. Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, and its longtime chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg, in connection with what prosecutors said was a yearslong tax-avoidance scheme in which executives were compensated with off-the-books benefits like free cars and apartments.
Mr. Trump has consistently derided the investigation as a politically-motivated “witch hunt.” Mr. Weisselberg’s lawyers have said he will fight the charges in court.
In his final weeks in office, Mr. Vance continued to push the Trump investigation forward. But the calendar was uncooperative, and the inquiry will not be resolved this year.
Mr. Vance said that, whatever his critics might think of the Trump case — or any of his other actions — his conscience was clear.
“I know what we did, I know why we did it and at the end of the day, that’s what I have to live with,” he said.
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
