'Scourge' Of Misconduct Allegations Plague Queens DA's Office

NEW YORK CITY — George Bell was 19 when cops handcuffed him to an interrogation room wall and beat him until he said he’d murdered an Elmhurst store owner and off-duty cop, reports and legal records show.

Bell was prosecuted, convicted and spent 24 years in prison before an investigation uncovered the prosecutor from the Queens District Attorney’s office had hidden evidence then lied about in court, according to official records and reports.

Bell was released in 2021. By then, he'd missed the chance to see his children grow and his marriage had fallen apart. If the prosecutor faced punishment of any kind remains unclear because, under New York law, such proceedings are not open to the public.

A group of law professors filed suit in federal court last week to challenge that law, which they say encourages rampant prosecutorial misconduct and sends innocent New Yorkers to prison without a fair trial.

“Prosecutorial misconduct is a scourge in New York State,” the lawsuit states. “Such misconduct has caused people to suffer decades of imprisonment with accompanying physical and mental trauma and separation from family and loved ones.

“The response of those responsible for attorney discipline has been, in effect, a collective shrug of the shoulders.”

The Federal Lawsuit

Law professors from the group AccountabilityNY.org and the Civil Rights Corps filed a civil rights suit in Manhattan Federal Court Thursday accusing the city’s Law Department and Queens District Attorney’s office of suppressing free speech and enforcing an unconstitutional law, legal records show.

“Courts found that the prosecutors in these grievances behaved improperly, but for some reason none of them ever received any public discipline,” said Peter Santina, Managing Attorney of the Prosecutorial Accountability Project at Civil Rights Corps.

“Some even received promotions to positions of even greater power. People have a right to know why.”

The Queens District Attorney’s office stands accused of promoting decades of prosecutorial misconduct and the Law Department, which represents city agencies in court, of threatening the professors when they tried to take action, according to the complaint.

“New Yorkers deserve better than public officials who engage in a campaign of intimidation and retaliation against those who would seek to address prosecutorial misconduct in this State,” the lawsuit contends.

“New Yorkers also deserve to know what wrongs these public officials have committed, and are committing, in their name.”

Press representatives from the Queens District Attorney’s office and the Office of Court Administration declined to comment.

But a Law Department spokesperson denied the claims and accused the professors of abusing the city’s grievances process as part of a personal crusade against the justice system.

“Prosecutors who engage in misconduct should be held accountable, but the professors’ use of the confidential attorney grievance process to seek reform is contrary to the law,” the spokesperson said.

“Their frustration with their lack of progress to increase accountability through advocacy and the legislative process does not entitle them to misuse the attorney grievance process or bring a frivolous lawsuit to bring attention to their goals.”

Judiciary Law §90(10)

At the heart of the professors’ complaint is New York’s controversial judiciary law § 90(10) which keeps grievance hearings against prosecutors closed to the public and bans complainants and authorities from speaking about the charges.

In New York City, complaints of prosecutorial misconduct go to the Grievance Committee for the Second, Eleventh and Thirteenth Judicial Districts, which consists of 21 court-appointed members, whose rulings are seldom made public.

The only exception is when the Appellate Division rules there is good cause to do so, but the law professors argue, “this almost never happens in practice.”

The law professors argue the Law Department, Queens District Attorney’s office and the city’s Grievance Committee, abuse this closed-door policy to let misconduct slide.

“All these Defendants use the confidentiality provisions of Judiciary Law § 90(10) as an excuse for inaction,” the complaint contends.

“The People of the State of New York suffer from a system of justice that, too often, means injustice for the downtrodden and immunity for those in power.”

Studies show prosecutorial misconduct is both a state and a national concern.

A Center for Prosecutor Integrity analysis compared the problem to an epidemic, identified more than 3,600 cases of prosecutorial misconduct identified in a 50 year period, and noted less than 2 percent of those prosecutors faced public sanction.

A 2020 study from the National Registry of Exonerations found prosecutorial misconduct contributed to 30 percent of more than 2,000 exonerations of past convictions.

In past decades, courts in Florida, Louisiana, New Hampshire and New Jersey chose to address misconduct by ruling over-broad confidentiality laws for attorney disciplinary processes were unconstitutional.

New York is one of just nine jurisdictions with such a law remaining on its books as of 2021.

Critics of Judiciary Law §90(10) — who include the Commission on Statewide Attorney Discipline — would have the state amend the law to make hearings public in cases with reasonable evidence that an attorney violated the Code of Professional Responsibility.

New York State attempted in 2018 to create a State Commission on Prosecutorial Conduct but were met with multiple legal challenges from the District Attorney Association of New York which eventually quashed the bill.

Legislation to create the panel finally passed in June, but the law professors say the resultant law was “just one insufficient step to address an enduring problem.”

The Contested Grievance Committee Complaints

Last week, the professors pushed the state a step closer toward banning Judiciary Law §90(10) with its complaint against the city’s Grievance Committee.

This civil action suit stems from a group of complaints filed earlier this year that garnered widespread media attention and sparked outage and retaliation from the Law Department, the complaint contends.

In May, the Law Professors filed 21 complaints against 21 Queens District Attorney’s office prosecutors whose alleged acts of misconduct were documented in public record, according to the lawsuit.

The group published their complaints on the website AccountabilityNY.org, asked that proceedings be conducted in public, and demanded systematic changes to the Grievance Committee’s judicial process.

“We do not mean a closed-door, cloaked process at the Queens District Attorney’s Office,” the group stated.

The Law Department responded in June with letters to the Grievance Committee, on behalf of the Queens District Attorney’s office, accusing the professors of violating state law.

Then-Corporation Counsel James E. Johnson argued the professors should be removed from proceedings because they filed complaints as a public campaign and not as individuals directly connected to the alleged misconduct, the complaint states.
The letter was not included in court filings, but quoted in the 41-page complaint filed Thursday

“[Johnson] accuses the Professors of ‘misus[ing] and indeed abus[ing]’ the grievance process ‘to promote a political agenda,’” the complaint states. “The approach taken by the Professors, according to the Corporation Counsel, “is both abusive and wrong.”

Johnson also accused the professors of violating Judiciary Law § 90(10) by publishing their complaints on AccountabilityNY.org, the suit contends.

The professors defend their complaints by noting New York attorneys are encouraged by the state bar association to report evidence of improper misconduct, and, as to Judiciary Law § 90(10), it wouldn’t be the first time a complainant shared details of a case.

“The supposed secrecy of a complaint by a member of the public would be news to the many aggrieved parties who, exercising their First Amendment rights, have told relatives, colleagues, and the press about the complaints they have filed about particular lawyers,” the lawsuit contends.

“It would also be news to those who filed complaints with grievance committees with respect to Rudolph Giuliani over his role in the 2020 election and January 6, 2021 Capitol riots, and then published their complaints widely in the press.”

Grievance Committee Chief Counsel Diana Maxfield Kearse denied the Law Professors denied the professors complainant status and effectively banned them from proceedings, the lawsuit contends.

“This was all double-talk designed to penalize the Law Professors for asserting their First Amendment rights,” the lawsuit states. “The Grievance Committee’s decision is a charade.”

The lawyers say their professional livelihood was threatened when the Law Department chief accused them of violating state law to a committee empowered to mete out punishment.

“The Corporation Counsel was suggesting that the grievance committees investigate and punish the Professors for their supposed breach,” the complaint states.

“And he threatened that if the Professors ‘continue on their quest to publicly disclose grievance complaints,’ he may be ‘compelled; to continue his abusive threats, wrongful accusations of misconduct and demands for punitive action against the Law Professors.’”

Their sweeping 41-page complaint challenges the constitutionality of the judiciary law that mandates misconduct hearings take place behind closed doors.

It also seeks to have alleged retaliatory actions of the Queens DA’s office and Law Department declared unconstitutional.

“All of this erodes the legitimacy of the grievance process and the claim that the bar is able to govern itself,” the complaint concludes

“All of these harms above and beyond the direct threat of professional discipline are intangible, but they are real, they are irreparable and they are ongoing.”

Update: This story was updated Nov. 10, 2021, to include comment from Peter Santina of the Civil Rights Corps.