Top Queens prosecutor quits after 'egregious' misconduct in death penalty case
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Queens Homicide Bureau Chief Brad Leventhal (left) has resigned. Eagle file photo by Paul Frangipane
By David Brand
A high-ranking Queens prosecutor accused of “deliberately” concealing key evidence to wrongfully convict three men for murder has resigned, officials said Monday.
Brad Leventhal, the veteran Homicide Bureau Chief in the Queens District Attorney’s Office, quit his post less than a month after Queens Judge Joseph Zayas admonished him for hiding police reports and other evidence while seeking the death penalty for the 1996 killing of a police officer and business owner. Zayas reversed the convictions in three cases tried by Leventhal and blasted him and his colleagues for the “egregious” misconduct uncovered by defense attorneys and the Queens DA’s new Conviction Integrity Unit.
Following the wrongful convictions, Leventhal’s now former boss, DA Melinda Katz, faced pressure from local lawmakers and community leaders to cut ties with the prosecutors accused of serious abuses.
Leventhal’s resignation comes less than two weeks after he stepped down from his role as adjunct professor at St. John’s University Law School March 19.
QNS.com first reported on Leventhal’s decision to quit Monday. The Queens DA’s Office did not respond to requests for comment from the Eagle, and has not responded to a single request for information related to the wrongful convictions.
A spokesperson for Katz told QNS that Leventhal left due to “mutual concern that his continued employment had become a distraction from the critical, on-going work of the office.”
Leventhal did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
Charles Testagrossa, another top prosecutor who concealed evidence leading to the wrongful conviction, stepped down from his position in the Nassau County District Attorney’s Office earlier this month in the wake of the wrongful convictions.
The departures come after defense attorneys and CIU investigators revealed that Leventhal and Testagrossa, the former head of the office’s Major Crimes Division, hid police reports and handwritten notes pointing to other likely suspects while they prosecuted George Bell, Rohan Bolt and Gary Johnson. The Queens DA’s Office said the three men killed NYPD Officer Charles Davis and check cashing store owner Ira Epstein during a botched robbery just before Christmas 1996.
A mountain of evidence uncovered by the CIU showed that the Queens prosecutors withheld evidence from defense attorneys that implicated another gang for the murders and then told the court there was no possible connection between the gang and the crime. 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.
Zayas took the prosecutors to task in his decision to reverse the convictions March 5.
“The stakes could not have been higher and the duty of care by the prosecution should have been correspondingly heightened,” Zayas wrote. “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 the DA’s Office sought the death penalty against Bell.
After the reversals, several local elected officials and candidates for city office began calling on Katz to cut ties with Leventhal and to review his past cases to check for 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.
Leventhal had headed the Queens DA’s Homicide Bureau since 2006, and spent several years before that as a trial prosecutor.
An official in the Queens DA’s Office told The New York Times that Leventhal has tried more than 80 cases in his career. She said the DA’s Office did not plan to review Leventhal’s other convictions.
Leventhal’s past cases include the high-profile trials of a Forest Hills doctor convicted of hiring a relative to kill her estranged husband and of Chanel Lewis, the man convicted of killing Howard Beach resident Karina Vetrano.
Katz has not yet decided whether she will retry Bell, Bolt and Johnson, in spite of significant pressure from local leaders and lawmakers and significant evidence pointing to other suspects.
“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.”
