Misconduct settlements topped $205 mil last year
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Gary Johnson, (pictured to the left with family) and Rohan Bolt (pictured on the right with family) both settled their lawsuits against the city for around $15 million last year. The settlements contributed to the highest payout total seen in New York City in years. Eagle file photos via GoFundMe
By Jacob Kaye
The city paid out over $205 million in police and prosecutorial misconduct settlements last year, marking a seven-year high, according to a new analysis released by the Legal Aid Society.
The settlement total in 2024 was in part driven by several wrongful conviction cases in Queens, settled decades after the initial arrests. Three Queens cases alone, each totaling around $15 million, accounted for nearly 22 percent of the total taxpayer settlements made by the city in 2024.
Among them was the case of Rohan Bolt and Gary Johnson, who, alongside George Bell, were wrongfully convicted of a double murder in 1996. The three men, who were officially found to have been wrongfully convicted in March 2021, spent a combined 72 years in prison for a crime none of them committed.
In April, Bolt was awarded $15.2 million and Johnson was awarded $15 million – Bell, who settled his lawsuit against the city in 2023, was awarded $17.5 million.
The new analysis from the public defender comes as Governor Kathy Hochul and lawmakers in Albany consider rolling back the 2019 reforms to the state’s evidence-sharing laws. The Legal Aid Society claims that the changes to New York’s discovery laws would ultimately lead to more wrongful convictions and most costly misconduct settlements in the years to come.
“The staggering payout totals for 2024 prove that the City would rather spend tens of millions in taxpayer dollars each year than take decisive action to dismantle the culture of impunity within the NYPD that allows this gross misconduct to persist,” Amanda Jack, the policy director with Criminal Law Reform at The Legal Aid Society, said in a statement.
“Our analysis, based on City data, comes amid attempts by elected officials and law enforcement to completely gut New York’s widely successful discovery reform, which helps guard against wrongful convictions and prolonged detention while exposing police misconduct,” Jack added. “If they succeed, injustices will surge, and taxpayers will ultimately bear the financial cost.”
A failure by police and Queens prosecutors to share evidence was at the heart of the wrongful conviction of Bolt, Johnson and Bell.
The trio was convicted of the 1996 murders of Ira “Mike” Epstein, the owner of an East Elmhurst check cashing business, and NYPD Police Officer Charles Davis even though police officers and prosecutors had evidence to suggest members of a local, well-known gang might have instead been behind the fatal robbery.
Their case was reviewed by the Queens district attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit in 2021.
While the CIU’s review put the blame on the police officers working the high-profile murder, documents uncovered in a separate case reportedly showed that prosecutors in the Queens DA’s office were also in possession of the evidence that likely would have had a major impact on the jury’s decision about Johnson, Bolt and Bell’s guilt.
“The stakes could not have been higher and the duty of care by the prosecution should have been correspondingly heightened,” then-Queens Administrative Judge Joseph Zayas said in 2021 before vacating the three men’s convictions.
“The opposite occurred in this case…the district attorney’s office deliberately withheld from the defense credible information about third-party guilt that is evidence that others may have committed these crimes,” added Zayas, who now serves as the second-most powerful judge in the state.
Then-assistant district attorney Brad Leventhal and his boss at the time, Assistant District Attorney Charles Testagrossa, withheld evidence from defense attorneys that pointed to other suspects in the case and suppressed deals and mental health records of key witnesses, according to records uncovered by the CIU.
Leventhal and Testagrossa also denied that members of a notorious crew known as the “Speedstick” gang had been implicated in the killings, though they possessed an NYPD officer’s written interview with a Speedstick member who fingered his counterparts in the killing at the check cashing store.
After the CIU’s initial report, the DA’s office said they also found that the ADAs on the case withheld information about a truck found by police that they believed to have been used by the robbers in the case. Not only did the truck not match the description of the one owned by one of the defendants, fingerprints found in the truck didn’t match either Johnson, Bolt or Bell.
The Legal Aid Society has warned in recent weeks that cases like Johnson, Bolt and Bell’s will become more commonplace in New York should Hochul successfully make her suggested changes to the 2019 discovery reforms.
The governor first suggested she was considering revising the laws during her State of the State address in mid-January. Citing an increase in the number of cases dismissed because of speedy trial violations, Hochul said her proposal would “close those loopholes that were created in our discovery laws that delay trials and lead to cases being thrown out on minor technicalities.”
While she initially said she’d propose a handful of tweaks to the laws, the proposal included in her executive budget was far more sweeping.
Under Hochul’s proposal, prosecutors would only have an obligation to turn over evidence they decide to be relevant in the case. The legislation would make a handful of other changes to the reforms, including a provision for the automatic redaction of sensitive information in discovery documents, including a witness’ address and personal data unrelated to the case.
But the Legal Aid Society, other public defender groups and advocates claim the changes would result in a full return to the unfair evidence-sharing practices that dominated criminal cases prior to the passage of the reforms. Often, prosecutors would wait until the eve of a trial to share their trove of evidence with a defendant’s attorney.
“The changes in the proposal would actually change the scope of the evidence required to be disclosed, not just the process by which it is disclosed,” the Legal Aid Society told the state legislature during a budget hearing last week. “Further, the changes to the process are so severe that they remove the incentive for prosecutors to follow the law by dramatically weakening the statute’s enforcement mechanism. It makes the statute into more of a set of guidelines rather than an enforceable law.”
