OPINION: Queens needs a real prosecutor to lead DA’s Office
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Daniel Alonso is a managing director at Exiger New York and a former Assistant U.S. Attorney
By Daniel R. Alonso
If you’re someone who hires people on a regular basis, you would never consider a candidate for a high-level managerial job who has no experience doing the job. Should the head restaurant chef be new to the kitchen? Or the dean of a college have no experience teaching? Of course not, and very few people would hire such people for something so important.
Yet that’s exactly what the Democratic voters of Queens are considering in the race for District Attorney. Unlike the way government or private-sector managers are picked, local state prosecutors—District Attorneys in New York—are elected in 45 states, including ours. The seven-way June 25 primary pits four former prosecutors against three lawyers who have never prosecuted a case. Two of those, Councilmember Rory Lancman and Borough President Melinda Katz, are largely career politicians with some background in criminal justice policy. Another, Tiffany Caban, is a public defender who has been a licensed lawyer for less than six years and has never managed anything.
So, what should voters make of this—should they look to a District Attorney who has actually prosecuted cases, or would that be an irrelevancy designed to promote the status quo? Up until recently, this had not really been an issue in this country: of the chief prosecutors in the 25 largest cities in the U.S. (counting Queens, Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx as one each), just two were never prosecutors.
But a new movement to elect more “progressive prosecutors” is pushing against that tradition. This effort aims to put prosecutors in office who pledge to look at the system differently by concentrating on reducing incarceration and focusing like a laser beam on inequities in the criminal justice system. Notably, the movement is agnostic as to whether elected prosecutors should have prosecutorial experience; more important to advocates is their intention to radically change the way things have been done in most jurisdictions for decades.
Those are laudable goals, to be sure, and many big-city prosecutors have emphasized similar ones for a decade or more. But almost totally glossed over in these discussions—and in the current election cycle—is the actual work that prosecutors do in investigating, charging, and trying cases. Watching a prosecutor’s office from the outside, one can be forgiven for not knowing some of the difficult and critical decisions that chief prosecutors have to make. And watching this election, one can be forgiven for concluding that DA is just another policy job like, say, being a legislator or Borough President.
The truth is to the contrary; progressive prosecutors are still prosecutors, and need the experience to do the trickier aspects of the job. For example:
Should detectives working with the DA tap someone’s telephone? Bug their office? Their bedroom? The law allows all this with proper court authorization, but without a point of reference, it is hard to know what standards to apply.
Should an Assistant DA compel by subpoena the testimony of a terrified witness, without whom a violent gang leader will be released?
If someone is about to flee the country but the case isn’t ready yet, is it acceptable to arrest them for a different charge, to ensure they don’t run?
What steps should be taken to protect a victim or witness from intimidation?
Is the evidence strong enough to charge someone with terrorism?
These and thousands of other decisions consume a prosecutor’s day, well outside of the glare of the courtroom and the media. It is, simply put, not a job for beginners. In the words of one of the Queens candidates who did serve as a prosecutor, Mina Malik,“You would not go to a podiatrist if you have a heart problem.” Indeed.
But there is another danger just as important as a lack of professional competence: the risk of politics entering the decision-making process in individual cases. Assistant prosecutors are taught from their first day to look at cases on their merits, guided by office policy, crime reduction imperatives, and especially, fairness. Although political considerations are appropriate in setting office policy—say, focusing on human trafficking or declining to prosecute low-level marijuana cases—they are inappropriate in individual cases.
That being the case, a reasonable fear is that those who are used to thinking politically and not as professional prosecutors might first ask themselves what a progressive, or a centrist, or a conservative, should do with a particular case. Thrust into meetings and required to make decisions, they would have no baseline of instincts from which to draw.
For all those reasons, I respectfully suggest that the voters of Queens should pick a candidate who has actually done the job. Although four have technically been prosecutors before, only two—Malik and former Supreme Court Justice Greg Lasak—have anywhere near the experience and success that are needed for the job. Of those, Lasak has the edge.
Not only was he a distinguished trial judge in Queens for 15 years, with a very low rate of reversals on appeal, but Lasak was also a veteran prosecutor of the very worst crimes inflicted on the people of Queens County. If, as I believe, the measure of a prosecutor lies in keeping the public safe, then Lasak’s experience prosecuting and supervising the prosecution of homicides, robberies, rapes, burglaries, domestic violence, and so many other crimes that truly affect people’s lives will be crucial.
But Lasak is also a strong candidate to assume the mantle of reformer. Most significantly, long before Manhattan DA Cy Vancecreated the first conviction integrity program in the state in 2010, Lasak took it upon himself to reinvestigate closed convictions and exonerate nearly two dozen people wrongfully convicted, which earned him praise from the founder of the Innocence Project. He has already reformed from within by, for example, creating diversion plans for offenders, and promises to do much more.
I’m not sure the people of Queens should make Greg Lasak the head public defender or the Borough President. But I’m certain they should make him the District Attorney.
Daniel R. Alonso, formerly an Assistant U.S. Attorney and Chief of the Criminal Division in the Eastern District of New York, which includes Queens, served as Chief Assistant District Attorney in Manhattan from 2010 to 2014. He is general counsel of Exiger.
Follow him on Twitter: @DanielRAlonso
