Ten years ago today, Brooklyn District Attorney Joe Hynes’ reign of error ended, when he lost the Democratic primary. It had been more than 100 years in New York City since a district attorney had been ousted by the voters, but after 24 years of scandal the voters had enough.
On Sept. 10, 2013, the incoming District Attorney Ken Thompson’s campaign headquarters was a joyous night as I, along with a half dozen other wrongfully convicted people, watched the primary results as they rolled in on the big screen TV. Wrongfully convicted people who get their convictions overturned all have one thing in common, they are resourceful, and since we weren’t getting justice in the courts we took it to the voters. The great thing about politics is an election can change everything and 10 years ago, that night it did.
Twenty years earlier I was convicted for, “false registration and illegal voting,” the first case of its kind. I didn’t vote twice in the same day or from two different places, I just registered to vote and voted. It was seven felony counts and I was tried three times on the same charge, which was also the first time anyone had been tried three times in Brooklyn since 1952. Obviously this involved lots of politics.
Thompson took office and things changed overnight. Dozens of scandal ridden assistant district attorneys were sent walking, as there is no civil service protection for prosecutors.
What was groundbreaking was that Thompson created a Conviction Review Unit which was revolutionary for its time. Over his brief three year tenure, until his untimely death, that unit resulted in more than 30 convictions overturned and other prosecutors around the country created their own Conviction Review Units.
Eric Gonzalez became the acting district attorney and when Gonzalez took over the one question asked by the press was: Would he continue Thompson’s tradition of aggressive review of wrongful convictions? That question was answered in January 2017 when the first conviction overturned by Gonzalez was my conviction, the case of People vs. O’Hara.
The investigation by the Conviction Review Unit revealed, when I ran for the state Assembly decades earlier against an incumbent, a conspiracy was formed with my former political opponent, his clubhouse lawyer and Hynes to get me disbarred. The way our criminal justice system works, a prosecutor decides who is guilty and then figures out a way to prove it.
After years of surveillance by Hynes’ office combing through my garbage and 20 years of bank records, and tax returns, they came up with nothing. Since I always voted, voting became the crime. As a lawyer, to get me disbarred any felony conviction would do.
My case was not an isolated incident of prosecutorial misconduct, but 10 years after that historic election, the DA’s office has morphed back to the old days as though nothing changed.
The Conviction Review Unit reports almost always conceal the identity and misconduct of the bad prosecutors. That’s a problem because nobody ever got wrongfully convicted in a courtroom by accident.
That’s just not how it works. A person only gets wrongfully convicted because a prosecutor sets out to frame the person, while the trial judge looks the other way.
Recently a lawsuit filed by a former assistant district attorney claims he was fired in retaliation for blowing the whistle on two people wrongfully convicted because the prosecutors concealed exculpatory evidence.
With more than $500 million paid by taxpayers, no prosecutor has ever been held financially accountable until now. Sam Kellner, another wrongfully convicted person, and I have filed claims on Hynes’ estate. Our civil cases will both be tried in the next year or two.
I got my law license back in 2009 and tomorrow I’ll be in a Brooklyn courtroom with my co-counsel, Dennis Kelly and Bob Kerrigan, conducting an “actual innocence trial” of Ronnie Wright, who has already served 15 years of a 40-year sentence for a murder he did not commit. There is no dispute on the actual innocence of Wright as the real killer confessed to Hynes’ prosecutors before Wright’s trial in 2008. Delay has been the prosecutor’s strategy.
All the wrongfully convicted cases, including mine, have one thing in common. We refused to take a deal. Every day we read about horrible crimes being committed by people with 30 or 40 priors; those people took the DA’s deal. Plea bargaining is easy for the prosecutor, but just who is getting the bargain?
With the DA trying less than 1% of his cases, our criminal justice system is being run by ambitious criminals and lazy prosecutors.
O’Hara is an attorney living in Brooklyn. He is of counsel to Kelly, Grossman and Kerrigan.
John O’Hara
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