By the spring of 2009, Charles
“Joe” Hynes was nearing the end of his fifth term of service as Brooklyn’s
District Attorney.

His reputation was mixed: His
office had been dogged for a long time by charges of cronyism, and he’d
recently been forced to drop charges in a high-profile murder conspiracy case
against a former FBI agent when his key
witness gave false testimony. But the onetime hero of the Howard Beach
racial case had over his years as district attorney earned praise from criminal
justice reform advocates who liked his progressive drug treatment and
alternative sentencing programs.

And so Hynes, at the age of 74,
decided that his accomplishments would outweigh his faults in the eyes of
Brooklyn voters, and he’d run for a sixth term. The campaign was easy. No one
ran against him.

But that easily gained sixth term
proved to be so full of trouble and embarrassment that it could well tarnish
his entire career.

  • One of Hynes’s most senior and trusted
    assistants, Michael
    Vecchione, was accused of railroading a Brooklyn
    murder suspect by withholding evidence and suborning perjury, prompting a $150
    million lawsuit that has, often publicly, portrayed Hynes’s office as a rogue
    operation in which misconduct was not only condoned, but encouraged.
  • A homicide detective who had worked intimately
    with the office came under fire after Hynes agreed
    to vacate a 23-year-old murder conviction based on the detective’s flawed
    work. Hynes ultimately wound up agreeing to review
    some 50 cases the detective had worked on with Brooklyn prosecutors to
    determine if others had been wrongly convicted and imprisoned.
  • The New York Times produced a scathing
    series of stories about how his office gave favorable treatment to sex
    offenders in Brooklyn’s politically influential Orthodox Jewish Community.
  • The withholding of evidence in
    a botched rape case led to the resignation
    of two prosecutors in the office.

None of it was enough to discourage
Hynes from, in 2013, running for a seventh term. But it seems it was enough for
Brooklyn voters to remove him from office, as Hynes last fall became the first
incumbent Brooklyn district attorney to lose
at the polls in 102 years.

ProPublica spent 2013 examining
questions of prosecutorial misconduct. We documented how
infrequently prosecutors are punished for often serious misconduct. We looked
in detail at the careers of two prosecutors, including Hynes’s assistant, Vecchione, to illustrate how, even
in the face of proven or alleged misconduct, prosecutors can
nonetheless see their careers advance. We for the first time explored the potential
abuse of the powerful prosecutorial tool known as material witness orders.
And we took the most in-depth look at a
current and potentially problematic prosecution: the murder case against a
mentally ill man accused of killing EtanPatz, a 6-year-old when he went missing on his way to
school in Manhattan in 1979.

Hynes’s office was the focus of much
of ProPublica’s work. And while Hynes spends his
final days in office, it is worth appreciating that the trouble that colored
his sixth and final term in office is far from settled.

The $150 million lawsuit brought
against Hynes and his office for the wrongful murder conviction of a man named Jabbar Collins could play out for months, even years.
Collins’s lawyer has accused Hynes of having over the course of many years
knowingly failed to discipline troubled prosecutors in his office. He has
accused Hynes of having run a “civil jail” in which witnesses were coerced into
providing false testimony in criminal cases. He has accused Hynes of protecting
Vecchione, the man who prosecuted Collins.

Hynes and Vecchione
have publicly insisted they did nothing wrong, and consider the lawsuit to be
without merit. But the lawyer, Joel Rudin, has
conducted numerous and lengthy depositions with members of Hynes’s staff, and
has won access to once confidential office documents. Within the last two
weeks, he has conducted a second round of questioning of Vecchione,
and deposed Hynes for more than seven hours.

The investigation
into the cases involving Louis Scarcella, the
detective accused of strong-arming confessions, has been underway for months,
but it is unclear whether it has identified any cases that need to be
reconsidered. Certainly, there has been no announcement that anyone is being
formally exonerated or freed from prison as a consequence of the investigation.
Hynes was criticized for appointing people who had been contributors to
his campaigns over the years to the 12-member panel of lawyers and judges
charged with overseeing the Scarcella probe.

Scarcella
has insisted for months that he led an honorable career and never framed anyone
across his more than two decades of work as a detective.

The future of the Conviction
Integrity Unit Hynes had put in place years ago is also to be determined. The
unit, meant to examine any legitimate challenges to convictions won by the
office, was deep into at least one case when it abruptly lost its chief, John
O’Mara.

The unit had been working in tandem
with Anthony Mayol, a lawyer representing a man named
Jonathan Fleming. Fleming is a Brooklyn man who is now serving his 23rd
year in prison for a murder he
says he didn’t commit. Members of O’Mara’s unit traveled to South Carolina
along with Mayol’s private investigators in November
to interview a new witness. The witness told them that he drove the real
shooter away from the scene of the crime, and it was not Fleming, according to Mayol.

Mayol
also said O’Mara’s unit found receipts showing that Fleming was paying his
phone bill at a hotel in Florida just hours before the murder—information
that was never disclosed to the defense at trial.

Mayol
recounted to ProPublica a conversation he had with O’Mara on Dec. 12.  Mayol said he asked if it was a good time to talk. “He
said, ‘Well, it’s both a bad and good time because in one hour I’ll be out of
here. I’m packing my stuff.’ He just punted it.”

In an email to ProPublica, O’Mara said “the investigation is at a delicate stage and detailed discussion and publicity risks the integrity and possibly the outcome of the matter,” adding that he met with the transition team for the incoming district attorney and gave them “detailed information about this and other ongoing cases.”

Sorting through the array of issues
left in the wake of Hynes’s sixth term will fall to the borough’s newly elected
district attorney, Kenneth Thompson.

A spokesman for Thompson said that
Thompson intends to add more prosecutors, investigators and paralegals to the
Conviction Integrity Unit and that he’ll “ensure a fully independent review of
the dozens of cases involving Mr. Scarcella.”







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