Katz carries new energy into role as DA
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District Attorney Melinda Katz has embraced her new role leading the Queens criminal justice system while continuing to engage local community organizations and advocate for reforms. Eagle photos by Caroline Ourso.
By Caroline Ourso
Special to the Eagle
Queens Borough Hall was Melinda Katz’s office and home-away-from-home for seven years, but on a January afternoon in the Helen Marshall Cultural Center built during Katz’s first term as borough president, she is simply a visitor.
It was Peace Week in New York City, and a small but lively group clad in orange have gathered in the tree-lined atrium to decry gun violence and promote communal healing. Katz attended the event during the start of her role as the top prosecutor in Queens, one of the largest counties in the United States. She has begun to implement the reforms she pledged during the campaign as she reshapes an office run by the same administration for nearly 30 years.
Katz sticks out among the violence interrupters and activists in her gray corporate pantsuit as she shakes hands with members of groups like Gangstas Making Astronomical Community Changes, all of whom were formerly incarcerated, many for decades.
Local anti-gun violence organizations like G-MACC and Wheelchairs Against Guns came together in the evening at the behest of LIFE Camp, one of New York City’s leading violence prevention organizations.
After shaking hands, Katz begins to juggle small pieces of amethyst and quartz displayed on the table in front of her, smiling as she chats with LIFE Camp employees and volunteers.
Many of the LIFE Camp members already knew Katz from her time as the Queens borough president.
“She was a consistent supporter of LIFE Camp and Peace Week,” said Kheperah Kearse, who is the director of wellness and therapeutic services at LIFE Camp. “So, to me, it was a natural progression for her to show up, and we appreciate her support.”
Still, other attendees said they were surprised to see a district attorney at the event.
"It shows she cares, that she’s aware of our community,” said Kareem Nelson from WAG. “If she didn’t show up, we would probably just look at her as another DA."
Katz is the first woman to hold the position and has promised a slew of reforms as Queen’s first new district attorney in nearly three decades. She narrowly won the Democratic primary for Queens district attorney last summer before triumphing in the general election.
After a brief introduction by Erica Ford, LIFE Camp’s founder, Katz took the stage to kick off the evening’s program.
“We are going to work on making sure that people of color are not getting arrested at more rates,” Katz announced to the nearly all-black crowd.
“In Queens County, we are going to have fairness and equity. We are going to start over.”
Queens pride
It’s widely known that Katz is a born-and-raised Queens resident. She makes sure of that.
She frequently speaks about her strong roots in the borough, and about her parents, both of whom led local institutions.
Her father, David Katz, was a widely sought-after conductor who is best known for founding the Queens Symphony Orchestra, while her mother, Jeanne Katz, founded the Queens Council on the Arts before a drunken driver killed her when Melinda Katz was only 3 years old.
Growing up as the sole woman in her nuclear family — she had three older brothers, one of whom died during last summer’s campaign — Katz cultivated a unique sense of responsibility from an early age.
“I was always the kid in the family who was studying while everybody else was doing their thing,” Katz told the Eagle. “And I was always the designated driver in college.”
She left the borough to attend college at the University of Massachusetts but came back immediately after to get her law degree from St. John’s University.
After interning for Michael Mukasey when he was a judge in the Southern District of New York and working on tenants rights for The Legal Aid Society, Katz entered the private sector as a securities litigator for Weil, Gotshal & Manges, which, at the time, was the second-largest law firm in Manhattan.
About five years in, she decided to shake things up and run for New York State Assembly. Thus began Katz’s prolific political career.
Katz has served as an assemblymember, a New York City councilmember, the Queens borough president and, now, as Queens’ district attorney. She has taken office at a crucial time, not only when criminal justice reform is at the forefront of local politics, but after a decades-long reign by a hard-line administration resistant to many of the changes taking place in the criminal justice system citywide.
A new era
Katz’s predecessor, Richard Brown, kept a tight grip on the Queens criminal justice system for 28 years until he died in May 2019, still technically in office, at the age of 86. His top deputy, John Ryan, took over as acting DA and finished out Brown’s term.
Katz’s first day in office coincided with the enactment of state criminal justice reforms, including earlier disclosure of discovery and the elimination of cash bail for misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies.
The reforms, combined with the pending closure of Rikers Island jails, has prompted a law-and-order backlash from conservative lawmakers, police unions and some media outlets.
The changes are understandably overwhelming for some people, Katz acknowledged.
“A lot of things changed on January 1,” she said. “You had all the new reforms. You had a new district attorney who was not a career prosecutor.”
Opponents have criticized Katz’s lack of prosecutorial experience, but she disagrees with their assessment and said she is not beholden to any crystallized ways of thinking.
“I'm not the reason we are having this discussion on criminal justice reform throughout this entire country. I was not part of the problem, and so I’m not embedded in the old ways,” Katz said. “I'm embedded in making sure we find new, innovative ways of protecting the community.”
“And so, from the perspective of doing all of this in one office, I think the fact that I was never a career prosecutor is one of the biggest benefits I have,” she added.
Katz was sworn-in to office at an inauguration ceremony last month.
Her perspective is evidenced by some of her executive policies. She immediately discontinued a policy that forced defendants to waive their right to a grand jury hearing in order to negotiate a plea deal for anything but the top count charge.
Katz has also opened a Conviction Integrity Unit that will review questionable cases at the request of the public to ensure no prosecutorial misconduct occurred.
She championed the importance of the unit throughout the campaign and appointed former Innocence Project attorney Bryce Benjet to begin reviewing cases.
“It's important to me for a few reasons. Number one, it truly bothers me that someone could be doing time for a crime they didn't do,” Katz said. “But second, it affects the whole family, right?”
“So for everyone who’s doing time that they didn't do a crime for, it affects their families, their brothers, their sisters,” she continued. “It affects their ability to put food on the table for people they care about; but lastly, someone’s out there that did it.”
Katz doesn’t plan on stopping there. She wants to implement a 24/7 gun buyback program, foster closer ties with community organizations like Cure Violence groups and end cash bail in Queens completely.
While implementing these new policies and programs, Katz hopes her constituents will trust her “steady hand” to guide the office in a direction that proves fair and just to all sides.
“Not only do we need to make sure that we prosecute the gun traffickers, the sex traffickers, rapists, murderers,” Katz said. “But we also need to save a lot of folks from the criminal justice system.”
“You need to make sure that you not only prosecute those that we just talked about but also make sure that the best way to lower crime is to keep our kids … out of the criminal justice system,” she added. “And you can do both. I believe that one is not preclusive of the other.
“At the same time, if someone is caught up in the criminal system, you can have justice for the victims and justice for defendants. They are not mutually exclusive, and there are those out there that would like you to think that it’s mutually exclusive. It is not.”
Incremental changes
Katz has faced questions about her commitment to ending cash bail — a pledge she made several times on the campaign trail. She initially said that her office would not seek cash bail for misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies, but she was pushed further left by other candidates, especially after the state passed its own bail reform laws forbidding exactly that.
Katz said she plans to cease asking for cash bail, but she would not give a timeline and instead deferred to the state.
“I would like to see the state get to a no cash bail system,” Katz told the Eagle. “I truly believe in my heart of hearts that bail, cash bail, is not the answer. But at the same time we’re trying to do it [in Queens], we need the state to get there too, right?”
She said supervised release is not currently sufficient as a replacement for cash bail because of the pure volume of cases.
“Right now, we don't have the adequate supervised release for the numbers that we need in the state of New York,” Katz said. “We certainly don't have them in Queens.”
Aubrey Fox, the executive director of the New York City Criminal Justice Agency, a city-partnered nonprofit whose goal is “reducing unnecessary pretrial detention,” agreed with Katz about the need for more caseworkers before cash bail can be completely eliminated.
“We are massively expanding operations in Queens to meet demands for supervised release,” Fox said. “Judges are looking for new kinds of conditions of release that are the least restrictive to ensure the return of the individual.”
While supervised release has a very strong tradition of helping secure returns, Fox added, CJA needs to hire more employees before it could even begin to deal with the anticipated tripling or quadrupling of caseloads in the coming months.
Political ease
Before her appearance at the Peace Week event, Katz had visited another familiar space — a gathering of political and business leaders.
On the 33rd floor of Mutual of America’s glossy high rise in Midtown Manhattan, Katz sat next to Cyrus Vance, Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, during a luncheon for the Police Athletic League.
PAL invited her to serve as the luncheon’s guest speaker, giving her a chance to win over some of her more conservative critics now that she’s in office.
John Catsimatidis, a billionaire who founded Gristedes and eventually branched out into real estate, aviation and oil, introduced Katz to the crowd of PAL supporters.
“Thank you for saving us from the dark side,” said Catsimatidis, the chairperson of PAL, referring to her close race last summer against democratic socialist Tiffany Cabán.
“You know, John, I get nervous every time you introduce me,” Katz said with a slight laugh before reciting her policy pitches.
She discussed discovery reform, her new Conviction Integrity Unit, expanding alternatives to incarceration, office restructuring and modernization, ending gun violence and, possibly her most difficult pitch, bail reform.
“Anybody hear about bail reform lately?” Katz joked. “Nobody's heard about it; nobody’s talked about it.
“We, in my opinion, should not go back to the old bail system,” she continued. “Not only was it designed in a way that was horribly outdated; it was misused, and it was abused, often with very tragic outcomes.”
She reminded attendees about the income disparities in the bail system.
“While many view bail as a policy that keeps people in jail, it can equally be viewed as a means for letting people out of jail,” she said. “I am not Pollyanna here, and I know that there are times when we need to hold someone before the trial. But of all the factors that we take into account as to whether someone should have pretrial incarceration, whether you have money should not be one of those factors.
“So we as an office are in the process of not only complying with the new bail reform but of eliminating cash bail completely. I do believe in eliminating cash bail,” she continued. “Now is the time...in Queens County that we all need to come together for a better day. I really believe that we can make things happen in Queens County.”
