Last month, Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez and Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance announced they were moving to dismiss nearly two hundred convictions involving Joseph Franco, a veteran narcotics detective who was indicted for lying under oath in 2019. Now, a coalition of eleven wrongful conviction and public defender organizations are challenging the validity of hundreds of other convictions going back decades.
In a letter (PDF) sent to all five borough District Attorneys and New York City’s Special Narcotics Prosecutors on Friday, the coalition identified twenty-two additional NYPD officers whose misconduct, they assert, merits the dismissal of all convictions in which they played an essential role.
The twenty-two have all been convicted for lying, corruption, and other forms of misconduct and nearly all have since left the force. But many of the arrests they helped make, which led to the convictions of hundreds of New York City residents, remain on the books.
“Detective Franco’s actions are simply unconscionable, but he is by no means the only corrupt NYPD officer who has engaged in such egregious behavior for personal gain at the expense of our clients,” said Elizabeth Felber, a signatory to the letter and a wrongful convictions attorney with The Legal Aid Society. “Our local DAs are well aware of these 22 officers and their misconduct. Prosecutors have a legal and moral obligation to right these injustices.”
Representatives for all five borough DAs and the Special Narcotics Prosecutor confirmed they are reviewing the letter, but did not comment on how they plan to respond.
Many of the officers named in the letter were convicted for crimes of dishonesty, such as perjury or planting drugs.
One detective in the letter was convicted of lying about seeing a man selling crack cocaine on a street in Jamaica, Queens. Another pleaded guilty after prosecutors determined she had made repeated false statements to secure a gun possession case in Washington Heights.
In past years, prosecutors would sometimes treat such incidents of dishonesty as one-offs, but that approach is no longer tenable in the era of criminal justice reform, argues Karen Newirth, another signatory and an attorney with The Exoneration Project.
“We're asking for this action now because, frankly, the District Attorneys have shown us that they recognize and see the world in a way that we see it,” she said. “People shouldn't be walking around with critical criminal convictions resulting from the actions of officers in whom no one, no reasonable person could have any confidence.”
The coalition flagged other officers in its letter for crimes of corruption or abusing the power of the badge.
One police officer in Manhattan was convicted of helping transport a kilo of cocaine for an NYPD undercover posing as a drug dealer. Two others in Brooklyn received probation sentences for bribery and official misconduct after they admitted to taking turns having sex with an 18-year-old woman, suspected of drug possession, in exchage for her release. The woman said she was raped.
Joseph Giacalone, a retired NYPD sergeant and an adjunct professor at John Jay, notes that mass conviction purges may be appealing to prosecutors because they do not require labor-intensive case by case reviews. But, he cautions, not all of the cases tied to officers named in the letter should be summarily wiped.
“If you have cases that involve lying, then, sure, every case has to be looked at and probably tossed out,” he said. “But when you're dealing with dumb behavior, people do something stupid, then that does not correlate to having cases purged.”
Two of the officers cited in the letter, for example, faced accusations of stripping down a teenager to his socks and shorts and leaving him in a marsh in Staten Island. Though the officers pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct and one was later named in a list of officers the Brooklyn DA said it could not trust, Giacalone argues their alleged misconduct and subsequent conviction was not as serious as a perjury charge.
“So these cops that dumped this kid out in the middle of nowhere, does that mean that they're flaking in cases and lying in court?” he said, referring to drug planting. “No, it just means that they made a really terrible decision.”
Instead, the John Jay College professor argues, less definitive cases should prompt a review for other acts of misconduct. Such analyses require tracking down potential witnesses, tracking down evidence in years-old cases, and other time-intensive tactics.
Newirth argues this approach is unfair to those dealing with the consequences of convictions right now.
“There are people who are unable to get jobs, who are unable to work in the field of their choosing, who are unable to live in public housing or get student aid or have a regular immigration status because of these criminal convictions,” said Newirth. “So they need to be vacated and purged from their records immediately so people can live free lives.”
In the meantime, the fallout from the 2019 perjury indictment against narcotics detective Joseph Franco has continued.
On Monday, Bridget G. Brennan, New York City’s Special Narcotics Prosecutor, announced that her office is following the Brooklyn and Manhattan DAs and seeking the dismissal of 24 more convictions in which Franco played an essential role.
