Criminal Justice

Subterms

    More stories

    • 163 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Who Will be the Next Manhattan D.A.? 8 Candidates Who May Prosecute Trump

      by

      Who will be the next Manhattan district attorney? The race is dominated by low-profile progressives who could reshape law enforcement in New York City.The race to become Manhattan’s next district attorney is shaping up to be one of the most important in decades, a watershed contest that is likely to fundamentally change the mission of the prominent office and may affect the future of former President Donald J. Trump.Yet the eight candidates are all relative unknowns, and, with no public polling, there is no clear front-runner. The victor is likely to win the general election in November without having received a majority of votes in the Democratic primary.Most of the candidates believe prosecutors should be sending fewer people to prison, especially for minor crimes, and that the office should play an active role in creating a less punitive, less racially biased criminal justice system.The election is being watched as a test of what a borough considered to be a liberal bastion wants from its head prosecutor, and just how deeply voters want the criminal justice system to change.“The Manhattan D.A.’s office is justifiably seen as one of the premier offices in the country,” said Eric H. Holder Jr., the United States attorney general under President Barack Obama. “What happens in the D.A.’s office will have an outsized influence on the path of reform around the country.”The current officeholder, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., announced earlier this month that he would not seek re-election.Mr. Vance, who has no plans to endorse a candidate, has held the position for three terms and was the handpicked successor of Robert M. Morgenthau, who over four decades built the office’s reputation as one of the largest and most ambitious prosecutorial agencies in the country.Mr. Vance’s announcement catapulted the race into the national spotlight, as his successor stands to inherit an investigation into whether Mr. Trump and his company committed fraud to obtain loans and tax benefits.The race can be divided into two camps, with three candidates who have not worked as prosecutors and five who have.The candidates who have never prosecuted a case — Tahanie Aboushi, Eliza Orlins and Dan Quart — have argued that the core work of the district attorney’s office needs to be revamped, shifting toward reducing incarceration and cutting back prosecution of low-level crimes.Four of the former prosecutors — Alvin Bragg, Lucy Lang, Tali Farhadian Weinstein and Diana Florence — largely agree. But they have pitched themselves as occupying a middle ground, focused on less sweeping changes. A fifth former prosecutor, Liz Crotty, has been less vocal in calling for systemic change.Ranked-choice voting — which allows voters to express who they would support if their top choice does not win — will not be used in the primary on June 22.That means whoever gets the biggest slice of votes in the Democratic primary, even if far from a majority, will go on to the general election. There, victory is almost certain because so far there are no Republicans on the ballot.The ‘progressive prosecutor’ movementIn the decade since Mr. Vance took office in 2010, views of criminal justice have shifted in many urban centers, transforming elections for local prosecutors.Activists — most prominently those in the Black Lives Matter movement — have used social media platforms to raise awareness of police violence, mass incarceration and racial bias in the justice system.“We as a general society are seeing on a larger scale how things like police violence are impacting people’s lives,” said Nicole Smith Futrell, a law professor at the City University of New York.Starting with the election of Kenneth P. Thompson as the Brooklyn district attorney in 2013, voters have rewarded candidates across the country who have focused on prosecutorial and police misconduct.These politicians — often grouped together as “progressive prosecutors” — have included Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, Kim Foxx in Chicago and George Gascón in Los Angeles.Tali Farhadian Weinstein, right, was general counsel to the Brooklyn district attorney, Eric Gonzalez, left.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesIn New York City, Eric Gonzalez, who was elected as Brooklyn district attorney in 2017, said he wanted to lead “the most progressive D.A.’s office in the country.” A former public defender, Tiffany Cabán, who pledged to stop prosecuting low-level crimes, lost the race for Queens district attorney by the slimmest of margins in 2019.The candidatesMost of the candidates competing to succeed Mr. Vance said that they will redirect the power wielded by the Manhattan district attorney. Others have pledged to fundamentally reduce it.Ms. Aboushi, 35, has pointed toward her adolescent experience of seeing her father convicted on federal conspiracy charges related to the theft of trucks transporting cigarettes. He was sent to prison for 22 years. Ms. Aboushi has said she wants to keep the district attorney’s office from harming families like her own.Along with Ms. Orlins, she has committed to cutting the office in half. She has also stressed the use of alternatives to prison. She has won support from the left and has been endorsed by the Working Families Party, a power player in New York.Ms. Aboushi, who has worked at her family’s law firm since 2010, would be the first woman, Muslim and nonwhite candidate to hold the office. (Every contender except for Mr. Quart would break at least one such barrier.)Ms. Orlins and Mr. Quart are running campaigns in a similar vein. Ms. Orlins, 38, a longtime public defender, has a fiery social media presence and often mentions the damage that she said prosecutors did to her clients. She has pledged not to prosecute the majority of misdemeanors.“I saw clients getting cycled through the system, getting locked up, getting bail set, getting offered ridiculous plea deals, spending a month or two months in jail for these low-level minor offenses,” she said.Mr. Quart, 47, a seven-term assemblyman and the only candidate with any previous political experience, has argued that he is the only person running who has already changed the system. He points to his role in successful efforts to repeal laws that protected police from accountability and put thousands of people in jail for low-level crimes.“My experience is about not just the rhetoric of reform, but actually achieving it,” Mr. Quart said.Assemblyman Dan Quart (D-Manhattan) is the only candidate with experience in politics.Patrick Dodson for The New York TimesAll three have argued that it is a virtue never to have prosecuted anyone, suggesting that the very act of prosecution should bear some stigma. By contrast, the ex-prosecutors in the race sprinkle suggestions for change with specifics on how to curtail certain crimes.Alvin Bragg, 47, the only Black candidate, seems comfortable running both as a reformer and a career law-enforcement official. Mr. Bragg, who was a federal prosecutor in Manhattan and later chief deputy attorney general in New York, was the only candidate to appear at both a “decarceral debate” held by public defenders and a forum organized by alumni of the Manhattan district attorney’s office — audiences with opposing viewpoints..css-yoay6m{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-yoay6m{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}.css-k59gj9{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;width:100%;}.css-1e2usoh{font-family:inherit;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;border-top:1px solid #ccc;padding:10px 0px 10px 0px;background-color:#fff;}.css-1jz6h6z{font-family:inherit;font-weight:bold;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.5rem;text-align:left;}.css-1t412wb{box-sizing:border-box;margin:8px 15px 0px 15px;cursor:pointer;}.css-hhzar2{-webkit-transition:-webkit-transform ease 0.5s;-webkit-transition:transform ease 0.5s;transition:transform ease 0.5s;}.css-t54hv4{-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-1r2j9qz{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-e1ipqs{font-size:1rem;line-height:1.5rem;padding:0px 30px 0px 0px;}.css-e1ipqs a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}.css-e1ipqs a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}.css-1o76pdf{visibility:show;height:100%;padding-bottom:20px;}.css-1sw9s96{visibility:hidden;height:0px;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-1cz6wm{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;font-family:’nyt-franklin’,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;text-align:left;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1cz6wm{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-1cz6wm:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1cz6wm{border:none;padding:20px 0 0;border-top:1px solid #121212;}Your Questions About Donald Trump’s Taxes, AnsweredYes. Hours after the Supreme Court rejected Mr. Trump’s final bid to defy a 2019 subpoena, millions of pages of records were turned over to the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which is now combing through them.The investigation is wide-ranging, but one particular area of concern is whether Trump’s company manipulated its property values, inflating them to obtain favorable loans while lowballing them to reduce its taxes. Investigators have also focused on the company’s long-serving chief financial officer.The records turned over to the district attorney’s office will remain private unless they are presented as evidence at a trial, but The Times has already uncovered a variety of potential financial improprieties, based on more than two decades of Mr. Trump’s tax data.If the district attorney were to indict Mr. Trump — far from a sure thing — the result would be the potential criminal trial of a former president. For his part, Mr. Trump has dismissed the investigation as a politically motivated “fishing expedition” and vowed to “fight on.”Mr. Bragg has leaned on his roots in Harlem. He often brings up the half-dozen times he has had a gun pointed at him, including three encounters involving police officers. He has said he wants to reduce unnecessary incarceration and fight crime.“One thing we need to reject is this false dichotomy that you’ve got between civil rights and public safety,” he said.Mr. Bragg’s closest competitor in straddling the two camps is Lucy Lang, who worked at the Manhattan district attorney’s office for 12 years. Ms. Lang, 40, is steeped in policy and has released the outlines of her approach to dozens of issues, from sex crimes to restorative justice. She presents herself as someone who would change the office but also has the experience to manage high-profile cases.Tali Farhadian Weinstein, 45, a former federal prosecutor and general counsel in the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, is running a more conservative campaign than her colleagues and has a substantial lead in fund-raising. She has been endorsed by Mr. Holder, with whom she worked at the Department of Justice.Though she emphasizes her experience in Brooklyn, where she led a unit that reviews convictions, Ms. Farhadian Weinstein has also been direct in describing her approach to prosecution. “You can’t just identify the problem,” she said. “You also then have to have a positive agenda about what the solution is.”The final two candidates stand apart from the field for different reasons.Ms. Florence, 50, is also a veteran of the Manhattan district attorney’s office and spent much of her career prosecuting fraud and corruption cases. She wants the office to refocus its energy on cases against the powerful.But she must overcome a significant hurdle: She resigned from the office after a judge found that she had withheld evidence from defense lawyers in a major bribery case, a serious ethical violation. A spokeswoman for Ms. Florence’s campaign said she has taken “full responsibility” for the mistake.Ms. Crotty, 50, a former assistant district attorney under Mr. Morgenthau, has conformed least to the blueprint set by the other contenders. Though she acknowledges systemic racism, she is loath to call for systemic solutions, saying instead that she will evaluate matters on a case-by-case basis. She has pledged to strengthen the office’s investigations of white-collar crime.The Trump investigationMr. Vance is likely to decide whether to seek an indictment against Mr. Trump before he leaves office. If he does, the next district attorney will have to handle the prosecution of a former president.The candidates have been reluctant to discuss the case in detail, saying it would be unethical to offer an opinion without seeing the evidence firsthand.It is unclear how the prospect of a trial of a former president might influence voters. Some strategists say it would matter little. Others say it favors experienced prosecutors.“This is Manhattan,” said Karen Friedman Agnifilo, Mr. Vance’s former deputy. “You’re going to have high-profile, high-interest, serious crimes. You need people who know how to handle those cases.” More

    • 113 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Cyrus Vance Will Not Run Again for Manhattan D.A.

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Trump’s TaxesWhat’s NextOur InvestigationA 2016 WindfallProfiting From FameTimeline18 Key FindingsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyNew Adversary Looms for Trump as Vance Exits Manhattan D.A. RaceThe decision by Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the district attorney since 2010, sets off a scramble for the office and makes it likely a new prosecutor will inherit an investigation into the former president’s business.Cyrus R. Vance Jr., who has been Manhattan district attorney since 2010, has told his staff he will not stand for re-election.Credit…Desiree Rios for The New York TimesMarch 12, 2021Updated 9:21 a.m. ETCyrus R. Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, announced on Friday he would not run for re-election, setting off a wide-open race to lead one of the most important crime-fighting offices in the country and making it highly likely that any potential case against President Donald J. Trump will be left in a newcomer’s hands.Mr. Vance made the long-expected announcement in a memo to his staff early Friday morning, just weeks before the filing deadline for the race. The many candidates clamoring to replace him are, with few exceptions, seeking to fundamentally reshape the office.A scion of one of Manhattan’s well-known liberal families, Mr. Vance is one of only four people to be elected Manhattan district attorney in nearly 80 years. He took office in 2010 and presided over the office during a decade when crime numbers plummeted and attitudes toward the criminal justice system changed.Mr. Vance was the handpicked successor of Robert M. Morgenthau, who served for 35 years and built the office’s reputation as one of the largest and most ambitious prosecutorial agencies in the country. When Mr. Vance took the helm, he vowed to stick to the practices that he said had served the office in good stead for years. He said while campaigning that he would not attempt to fix what was not broken.But at times, Mr. Vance, 66, seemed to be swimming against the current of public opinion in his liberal district, as the Black Lives Matter and Me Too movements raised awareness of ingrained biases in the criminal justice system and led to calls for wholesale reform.The eight-way race to succeed Mr. Vance reflects those newer political currents. Three of the candidates running to be New York County’s lead prosecutor have no prosecutorial experience at all. The five others in the race have distanced themselves from Mr. Vance, including two who worked in his office, Lucy Lang and Diana Florence, who rarely mention his tenure in a positive light.Mr. Vance’s announcement, first reported in The New Yorker, was widely expected. He had not been actively raising money or campaigning.During his three terms in office, Mr. Vance won praise for pioneering data-driven methods to more effectively target violent crime, but was faulted in some quarters for being too tentative when investigating powerful figures.“He was cautious in what high-profile cases he brought,” said Marc F. Scholl, a veteran of the district attorney’s office who left for private practice in 2017. “He was more interested in not making mistakes than anything else.”Mr. Vance’s critics have focused on his handling of sex crime investigations, starting with the case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund who was accused of sexually assaulting a hotel housekeeper in 2011. Mr. Vance dropped the charges against Mr. Strauss-Kahn after prosecutors in his office raised questions about the victim’s credibility.After the case against Mr. Strauss-Kahn fell apart, Mr. Vance said that his success or failure could only be measured over time. Some of his most notable victories have involved the same figures whom critics said he had treated leniently earlier in his tenure.For instance, in 2015, Mr. Vance chose not to press charges against the movie producer Harvey Weinstein, whom an Italian model had accused of groping her during an interview in his SoHo office. She later obtained an incriminating tape of him talking about the incident, but charges were dropped over prosecutors’ concerns a jury would not believe her.But in 2018, the year after decades of allegations against Mr. Weinstein set off the Me Too Movement, Mr. Vance brought the first criminal charges against him. Mr. Vance won a major victory in February 2020 when Mr. Weinstein was found guilty of felony sex crimes against two women. The following month, he was sentenced to 23 years in prison.Mr. Vance also drew fire, then praise, for his dealings with Mr. Trump.After Mr. Trump rose to power, the district attorney was criticized for a 2012 decision to end a criminal investigation into fraud allegations against Mr. Trump and two of his children, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr.Prosecutors had been looking into whether the Trumps misled investors in a condominium project. Mr. Vance said the investigation ended in part because victims would not cooperate after having reached a civil settlement with the Trump family.For many Democrats, however, few of Mr. Vance’s triumphs loom larger than his dual wins at the Supreme Court as he later sought to investigate Mr. Trump and his business. Prosecutors are examining whether Mr. Trump fraudulently manipulated property values to obtain loans and tax benefits.In July of last year, the justices declared that Mr. Vance’s office — and by extension, all state prosecutors — had the right to seek evidence from a sitting president in a criminal investigation, setting a lasting limit on the scope of presidents’ powers and immunity from prosecution.And last month, the justices rejected in a brief unsigned order a last-ditch attempt to block Mr. Vance’s subpoena for Mr. Trump’s tax and financial records.“I don’t know how many local prosecutors could do that,” said Karen Friedman Agnifilo, Mr. Vance’s longtime deputy. “Just the ability to bring that case, go to the Supreme Court and now to be in possession of Donald Trump’s tax returns and doing a sweeping criminal investigation into the former president of the United States.”Mr. Vance was slower than some other big-city prosecutors when it came to certain reforms popular with progressives — Manhattan prosecutors were still taking on low-level marijuana cases as late as 2018 — but he did seek to reshape the office.In response to crime dropping to lows not seen since the mid-20th century, his office cut total prosecutions by more than half and invited the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit focused on criminal justice reform, to examine its record on racial disparities in prosecution..css-yoay6m{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-yoay6m{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}.css-k59gj9{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;width:100%;}.css-1e2usoh{font-family:inherit;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;border-top:1px solid #ccc;padding:10px 0px 10px 0px;background-color:#fff;}.css-1jz6h6z{font-family:inherit;font-weight:bold;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.5rem;text-align:left;}.css-1t412wb{box-sizing:border-box;margin:8px 15px 0px 15px;cursor:pointer;}.css-hhzar2{-webkit-transition:-webkit-transform ease 0.5s;-webkit-transition:transform ease 0.5s;transition:transform ease 0.5s;}.css-t54hv4{-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-1r2j9qz{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-e1ipqs{font-size:1rem;line-height:1.5rem;padding:0px 30px 0px 0px;}.css-e1ipqs a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}.css-e1ipqs a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}.css-1o76pdf{visibility:show;height:100%;padding-bottom:20px;}.css-1sw9s96{visibility:hidden;height:0px;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-1cz6wm{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;font-family:’nyt-franklin’,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;text-align:left;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1cz6wm{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-1cz6wm:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1cz6wm{border:none;padding:20px 0 0;border-top:1px solid #121212;}Your Questions About Donald Trump’s Taxes, AnsweredYes. Hours after the Supreme Court rejected Mr. Trump’s final bid to defy a 2019 subpoena, millions of pages of records were turned over to the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which is now combing through them.The investigation is wide-ranging, but one particular area of concern is whether Trump’s company manipulated its property values, inflating them to obtain favorable loans while lowballing them to reduce its taxes. Investigators have also focused on the company’s long-serving chief financial officer.The records turned over to the district attorney’s office will remain private unless they are presented as evidence at a trial, but The Times has already uncovered a variety of potential financial improprieties, based on more than two decades of Mr. Trump’s tax data.If the district attorney were to indict Mr. Trump — far from a sure thing — the result would be the potential criminal trial of a former president. For his part, Mr. Trump has dismissed the investigation as a politically motivated “fishing expedition” and vowed to “fight on.”He also poured money into community organizations that helped with crime prevention, and re-entry for those who had been incarcerated.The funds came from the $800 million Mr. Vance obtained for the office through asset forfeiture — money reaped from settlements with big banks accused of violating federal sanctions. He used the windfall as seed money to fund various programs.Perhaps the most expansive use of that money was its funding of a program to eliminate the nationwide backlog of rape kits — which preserve DNA evidence left by an assailant — in more than a dozen states. The push to clear that backlog has led to hundreds of prosecutions in unsolved cases and more than 100 convictions.Mr. Vance also put to rest an older case that had haunted the city for decades. In 2017, a jury convicted a former bodega worker of killing Etan Patz, a boy who disappeared in SoHo on his way to school in 1979, changing the way many American parents thought about protecting their children.The campaign to replace Mr. Vance has been dominated by talk of deep changes to the criminal justice system. Two of the candidates, Tahanie Aboushi and Eliza Orlins, have vowed to reduce the size of the Manhattan district attorney’s office, currently the largest local prosecutor’s office in the country, by 50 percent or more in order to limit its power.One potential strike against those candidates — as well as Dan Quart, a state assemblyman — is their lack of prosecutorial experience, which each has touted as a virtue. When it comes to a possible case against Mr. Trump, veterans of the office have argued, there is little substitute for having handled complicated investigations and high-pressure prosecutions.But some progressive Democrats say that the candidacies of Ms. Aboushi, Ms. Orlins and Mr. Quart reflect a hunger for changes in how prosecutors handle cases in Manhattan that acknowledge the harm the system has done to Black people and other marginalized communities.Janos Marton, a leader in New York’s movement to reduce incarceration, was a candidate to replace Mr. Vance until he dropped out of the race in December. He said Mr. Vance and his assistants, despite having tried at times, had not kept pace with reforms prosecutors were adopting elsewhere, like in Philadelphia, Chicago and even Brooklyn.“They enacted really punitive policies against low-income communities of color and even the reforms that they occasionally would embrace were quite far behind the curve,” he said.The investigation into the Trump organization is ongoing. Last month, The New York Times reported that Mr. Vance had enlisted a former federal prosecutor with expertise in organized crime and white collar crime to help with the inquiry. If it results in charges, Mr. Vance’s successor will almost certainly oversee the case.Mr. Vance’s announcement will inevitably prompt considerations of his legacy. But if he does bring charges against Mr. Trump, that action, and the success or failure of the resulting case, may single-handedly determine how Mr. Vance is remembered.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More