Civil Rights Lawyer Janos Marton Joins Manhattan DA Race

NEW YORK, NY — A civil rights lawyer that played a role in the effort to lobby the city to close Rikers Island is joining the race to oust Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, pitching himself as the most progressive candidate in the growing field.

Janos Marton, now with the American Civil Liberties Union's Smart Justice campaign to cut the United States' prison population in half, launched his campaign for the 2021 Manhattan District Attorney election on Monday.

"For far too long, our Manhattan DA has gone after the most marginalized members of our community while turning a blind eye to the abuses of special interests, billionaires, and corrupt landlords," Marton said in a statement posted to his social media accounts.

Marton has worked for years to hold New York's politicians accountable. The attorney served as special counsel to the short-lived Moreland Commission to Investigate Public Corruption and later lobbied the city government as part of the #CLOSErikers campaign. At his current position with the ACLU the lawyer is largely focused on decarceration, which he is making a central policy in his campaign.

Some of Marton's campaign proposals include: Reducing Manhattan's pretrial prison population by 80%, eliminating the use of solitary confinement and revisiting long prison sentences that were handed down to convicts in the past.

Marton is a native of the Upper West Side who studied at Dartmouth and then Fordham Law School, according to his campaign website.

The 2021 Manhattan DA race figures to be the first competitive election for the seat in more than a decade. New York Law School Professor and former prosecutor Alvin Bragg was the first to launch a challenge against incumbent Cyrus Vance and Manhattan State Assemblymember Dan Quart is expected to announce whether he will run in the coming months.

News reports in 2017 said that Vance got big campaign contributions from lawyers for the Trump family and Weinstein around the time that he closed probes into their clients. The revelations sparked a write-in challenge from the civil rights attorney Marc Fliedner, which Vance easily survived.

Vance is only the second District Attorney to serve Manhattan since 1975. He won an election in 2009 to succeed longtime DA Robert Morgenthau, who endorsed Vance as his successor.