A New York prosecutor is seeking to dismiss 378 cases linked to more than a dozen corrupt New York Police Department officers.
Brooklyn district attorney Eric Gonzalez will ask a judge to overturn 47 felony and 331 misdemeanor convictions that derived from the work or testimony of 13 NYPD officers.
The move is part of a larger effort by local prosecutors to review cases tied to officers who abuse their power. Gonzalez’s office said the district attorney has “lost confidence” in cases where the convicted NYPD officers served as witnesses or arresters.
“These former police officers were found to have committed serious misconduct that directly relates to their official job duties, calling into question the integrity of every arrest they have made,” Gonzalez said in a statement.
Gonzalez’s Conviction Review Unit identified the cases where the officers’ testimony “was essential to proving guilt.” It is the sixth-largest mass dismissal in U.S. history, according to the National Registry of Exoneration. Most of the cases are misdemeanor possession of a controlled substance and other drug offenses, followed by vehicular and traffic law violations. The convictions are from arrests between 1999 and 2017, but no one is currently incarcerated as a result.
The Legal Aid Society, a nonprofit representing 11 of the people whose convictions Gonzalez plans to vacate, applauded the district attorney’s effort and urged prosecutors to conduct the reviews on an ongoing basis and not just when facing public pressure.
“The people prosecuted in these cases were forced to endure hardships that should never have happened to begin with,” Elizabeth Felber, the society’s director of its wrongful conviction unit, said in a statement Wednesday. “Some individuals lost years of their lives serving prison sentences and many suffered collateral harm including housing instability, loss of employment, and severed access to critical services, all because of the words of these corrupt police officers.”
The district attorney’s office said most of the officers were convicted of crimes in other boroughs or in federal courts. The district attorney said the unit’s review of the cases is an upshot of the office’s decision in April 2021 to dismiss 90 convictions that relied on the work of a former detective, Joseph Franco, who was indicted for multiple perjuries.
About half of the arrests were made by four officers involved in a Brooklyn drugs-for-information scandal over a decade ago. Sixty-eight were linked to two narcotics officers, Richard Hall and Eddie Martins, who pleaded guilty to charges related to receiving a bribe in the form of sexual acts from a detainee in 2019.
Former New York City Detective Oscar Sandino pleaded guilty in 2010 to deprivation of civil rights for forcing a woman he arrested to perform oral sex in a Queens stationhouse bathroom in 2008, and was linked to 43 of the convictions that Gonzalez wants dismissed. He also pleaded guilty to assaulting an off-duty court officer who was in custody.
Also on the list is Jerry Bowens, who pleaded guilty to murder and falsifying business records. The district attorney’s office said he supplied drugs to an informant in exchange for information, and while his criminal case was pending, in 2009, he shot and killed his ex-girlfriend. Bowens, who was also part of the Brooklyn South Narcotics Division, is linked to 134 convictions on Gonzalez’s list.
Gonzalez asked Brooklyn Supreme Court justice Matthew D’Emic on Wednesday, Sept. 7 to start dismissing the felony convictions.
