After 'egregious' misconduct, St. John's Law cuts ties with top Queens prosecutor
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Brad Leventhal (left) was accused of “egregious” and “deliberate” misconduct while trying three wrongfully convicted men for murder, including one man facing the death penalty. Eagle file photo by Paul Frangipane
By David Brand
Update: March 22 at 4:51 p.m. — This story has been updated to include information from an emailed message from St. John’s University Law Dean Mike Simons to students.
A top Queens prosecutor who hid key exculpatory information to secure three wrongful murder convictions will no longer teach a class on evidence practice to aspiring attorneys at St. John’s University Law School, officials said.
The law school cut ties with Brad Leventhal, the Homicide Bureau Chief in the Queens District Attorney’s Office, less than two weeks after Justice Joseph Zayas said Leventhal and his colleagues concealed police reports and other evidence while seeking the death penalty for the 1996 killing of a police officer and business owner. Leventhal also orchestrated deals with witnesses and informants who fabricated testimony, including a supposed jailhouse cooperator who later killed a man after being released with help from the Queens DA’s office.
Leventhal has served as an adjunct professor at St. John’s Law since 2012. He and the school each said they did not want the misconduct and wrongful convictions to become a “distraction.”
“The university and he came to an understanding,” a St. John’s spokesperson said. “He didn’t want it to become a distraction and the dean picked up the course.”
Leventhal told the Eagle Friday that he made the decision to stop teaching mid-semester.
“The decision to not conclude the Spring semester at St John's Law School was mine,” Leventhal said. “I do not want the students to be unnecessarily distracted in their studies during the remainder of this semester.”
In an email to students Sunday night, Law School Dean Mike Simons said he was taking over the course and that Leventhal would not teach at St. John’s in the future. Simons said he talked with the prosecutor about leaving the school after learning “the extent of Mr. Leventhal’s involvement” in the wrongful convictions.
“Mr. Leventhal is not scheduled to teach at St. John’s next year, and neither Dean [Sarah Jean] Kelly nor I have any plans for him to teach in the future,” Simons wrote.
In his message, Simons also discussed the disproportionate impact of the criminal justice system on people of color, particularly Black men. All three defendants convicted as a result of the prosecutorial misconduct were Black.
Prosecutors’ “obligation to deal fairly with the accused and to be candid with the courts is particularly consequential given the racial disparities pervasive in our criminal justice system,” Simons continued.
St. John’s severed ties with Leventhal shortly after his former colleague Charles Testagrossa quit his job as a top official in the Nassau County DA’s office in the wake of the wrongful conviction rulings.
Defense attorneys and investigators in the Queens DA’s new Conviction Integrity Unit revealed that Leventhal and Testagrossa, the former head of the office’s Major Crimes Division, hid police reports and concealed handwritten notes pointing to other likely suspects while prosecuting George Bell, Rohan Bolt and Gary Johnson for the murders of NYPD Officer Charles Davis and check cashing store owner Ira Epstein during a botched robbery just before Christmas 1996.
Zayas overturned their convictions March 5, allowing the three men to leave prison after nearly a quarter-century behind bars.
A mountain of evidence uncovered by the CIU and defense attorneys showed that the Queens prosecutors withheld compelling evidence pointing to a known stickup crew that had committed similar crimes around the time of the murders.
“The stakes could not have been higher and the duty of care by the prosecution should have been correspondingly heightened,” Zayas said in his decision. “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.”
He called the evidence suppression “particularly egregious” because prosecutors sought he death penalty against Bell.
The Queens prosecutors stuck to their case against the three wrongfully convicted men, despite the compelling information implicating other likely suspects, and without physical evidence tying the defendants to the crime. Instead, they relied on flimsy eyewitness accounts and fabricated testimony from a jailhouse informant, Reginald Gousse, who said Bell copped to the killings while on Rikers Island.
In exchange for Gousse’s concocted testimony, Leventhal and the Queens DA’s Office recommended lesser charges and a lighter sentence for his own armed robbery case. Their help allowed Gousse to avoid state prison and deportation to his native Haiti. He later killed a man while impersonating a police officer.
Leventhal, Testagrossa and their colleagues also relied on a false confession from a fourth co-defendant named Jason Ligon. Ligon signed a statement saying he participated in the fatal botched robbery, even though he was not in New York City at the time of the crime. He told the Village Voice that detectives gave him a confession to sign while he was drunk.
Leventhal and the Queens DA’s Office consented to release Ligon from jail a few weeks after securing convictions and virtual life sentences for Bell, Bolt and Johnson.
Following the March 5 wrongful conviction reversals, several local elected officials and candidates for city office have called on Queens DA Melinda Katz to review every case tried by Leventhal and Testagrossa to see if they committed similar abuses.
“Anyone even remotely related to this case must be removed, and an expeditious review of the prosecutors' prior convictions should be a top priority for the Queens DA's Office,” Councilmember I. Daneek Miller told the Eagle March 9.
The Queens DA’s Office has not responded to requests for information from the Eagle for stories about the wrongful convictions and prosecutorial abuses. An official told The New York Times that they did not plan to review Leventhal’s cases.
Katz has not yet decided whether she will retry Bell, Bolt and Johnson, in spite of significant pressure from local leaders and lawmakers.
“The DA’s office needs to dismiss the indictments,” said 32BJ President Kyle Bragg, who organized Black leaders to urge Katz to consent to overturning the convictions. “The prosecutors need to go after the real perpetrators of this heinous crime and bring them to justice and accountability.”
