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Brian: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. The role of the district attorney is in flux around the city and around the country. We saw that play out in the 2019 Queens DA race. Remember that, when all the candidates, including the former Queens prosecutors seemed to run on reform ideas? The same is now beginning to hold true in the Manhattan DA's race. Cy Vance's leaving office with, by our count, seven of eight candidates promising reforms in how and what they prosecute. You'll remember that in Queens, former Borough President Melinda Katz barely defeated former defense attorney Tiffany Cabán whose platform included ending all-cash bail and had a long list of crimes the office would no longer prosecute.

Melinda Katz won. The most progressive prosecutor in the race, potential prosecutor, did not. As district attorney, Katz has followed through with her campaign promise to establish a conviction integrity unit to examine past convictions for possible reversals. Out of that process on March 5th, a judge granted the DA's request and reversed the conviction of three men, George Bell, Gary Johnson, and Rohan Bolt, who had served 24 years for the robbery and murder of a check-cashing store owner and his off duty security guard and NYPD officer. Not everything she's done has been reform-oriented enough for the progressive criminal justice reformers.

Let's look at what happened in that particular case. Why and how it was finally reversed and what it tells us about the Queens DA's office then and now and the shifting role of prosecutors in general as the debate starts in earnest to succeed Cy Vance in Manhattan. I'm joined for this by George Joseph, our investigative reporter with WNYC's race and justice unit, who has looked in-depth at this particular case, and by David Brand, managing editor of the Queens Daily Eagle, who covers the DA's office regularly. Hi, George, and welcome back, David Brand to WNYC.

George: Good morning, Brian.

David: Thanks a lot, Brian.

Brian: George, can you tell everybody about these three convictions? Some people will have heard your reporting on Morning Edition today but tell us about these three convictions that the judge voided so many years later. Briefly, what was the original crime?

George: Of course. The original crime was a double murder in 1996. What happened was a group of gunmen attempted to rob a check-cashing store. Something went wrong. They ended up shooting the check-cashing store owner and an off-duty police officer who was working security that day. The gunman fled, and afterwards the NYPD launched a massive manhunt. They ended up charging several people who went through the courts process. Why this conviction was overturned was because, 20 years later, we learned and determined that multiple critical pieces of evidence including police reports and prosecutors' handwritten notes were never turned over to the defense, showing that alternative suspects from a robbery gang were potentially implicated in that original robbery but were withheld from the defendants.

Three men ended up spending more than 20 years in prison because of that failure to disclose evidence and also because of prosecutors' statements to the court suggesting that no such evidence existed, or denying its existence.

Brian: Well, and for some historical and social context, this was 1996. Giuliani, a former prosecutor himself, was mayor and the crime rate was on the way down but still high. Since this crime included the murder of a police officer, the pressure was really on to find the perpetrators quickly. How much do you think all of that contributed to what now appears to have been a wrongful conviction, with 24 years served in prison by these three men?

George: That context is very key here because it was a murder right before Christmas. The officer, the off-duty officer who was killed was the sixth officer killed that year and there was a lot of pressure on the police department from Mayor Giuliani and from the press, et cetera, to solve this crime. They ended up, after a few days, rounding up suspects just in time for Christmas. How the police did so is up for a lot of debate. One of the young people from that time that we've profiled, George Bell, who is accused of being the shooter, alleges that police assaulted him and coerced him into confessing. Subsequently, he recanted his confession.

In the video of his statement, after the initial interrogation where those allegations were made, you can see his hair is unraveled. At one point, he uses the phrase, "Being framed." At another point, he turns to the detective and says, "Did good?" As in, "Did I do good?" There are a lot of troubling signs about what went on in the precinct house. There was a lot of pressure on the police to solve that case and solve it quickly.

Brian: I want to play a little audio that you included in your story from George Davis Bell's conviction, confession I should say, at the time. David Brand from the Queens Daily Eagle, be patient, we'll get to you in a minute or two on your current reporting on Melinda Katz as Queens DA. These three men were convicted based on no physical evidence but there were confessions, which you were just describing in terms of how questionable they were, and an eyewitness, both of those things with issues. Here's a little from the videotape portion of George Bell's confession.

Speaker 1: What was Carl's role during the robbery?

Speaker 2: Oh, man. I'm being framed. He stood outside.

Brian: Listeners, I don't know if you could hear it because he just whispered it in there. It was like he was talking to himself under his breath, thinking out loud as he was being interrogated after his arrest on false premises. He whispered in that clip, "I'm being framed. I'm being framed." Just barely audible. George. George? Yes, George. He's George and you're George. Talk about the context of that and how you used it in your story.

George: We have to remember George Bell at this time was a 19-year-old kid without a criminal record. Police show up to his house because they had questioned earlier a man who was a drug dealer who they had recently arrested, who was suffering from hallucination issues and had fingered Bell for this crime. They snatch Bell from his home at night, at 11:30 on Christmas Eve, bring him to a police station, handcuff him to the wall for four hours. Then bring him to an interrogation room at 4:30 AM approximately, where they interrogate him for about five hours.

At first, he initially denied involvement but then he alleges police assaulted him, punched him, yelled at him, "You know you did it." eventually, he cracked and said a story but the story or confession that he told had inconsistencies with what police knew at the time. He said they used a burgundy getaway car, he and his co-conspirators. Most of the witnesses told police the car that was seen at this scene was blue or green. He said that he shot the business owner three to four times in the chest. Autopsy showed it was one shot that killed the business owner, a single gunshot.

There were multiple inconsistencies but you have to remember this is a young man who was just an employee at Old Navy, didn't have experience with the criminal justice system, is in there with no lawyer and police who were under a lot of pressure to solve this case. Something went wrong.

Brian: Just one more question about 1996 before we bring it to the present and how this now got reversed under current Queens DA, Melinda Katz. What can you tell us about the prosecutors, George? Who were they in 1996? Who won this wrongful conviction? Is there any evidence that they had any doubts about what they were doing and went forward anyway?

George: The two prosecutors on this case were named Charles Testagrossa and Brad Leventhal. Charles Testagrossa was a veteran prosecutor in the office by this point. Brad Leventhal was the junior prosecutor on the case. Four months, approximately a few months after Bell's arrest, police started investigating another gang, a gang that had done a similar robbery of an armored car and taken money. Police were investigating that gang as potential alternative suspects. What we've learned now is that police generated a report pointing to that gang is actually being involved in the check-cashing store robbery that Bell and his co-defendants were accused of.

That report did make its way to the Queens DA's office, but was never turned over to his defense. Similarly, Charles Testagrossa, Bell's prosecutor, around that time, took handwritten notes of an interview he did with an NYPD detective. In those notes, again, similarly, he ties that alternative suspect gang to this crime that Bell and his co-defendants were accused of. In its review of what happened, the Queens District Attorney's Office has said something to the effect of, "We find no evidence that Testagrossa remembered his own handwritten notes when telling the court there was no connection between these two cases."

Bell's team points out even if the trial prosecutors were initially in the dark about the potential connections to the alternative suspects, the defense was constantly asking about this in the trial. Why didn't they want to figure out, if there was the connection, what evidence they had? Two, why did they continually tell the judge there was no connection, this stuff was irrelevant, and effectively block this information from coming out, information that could have given jurors reasonable doubts about these cases?

Brian: David Brand from the Queens Daily Eagle, let's flash forward to the present. Why did this case end up as part of the new Queens DA Melinda Katz's conviction integrity unit? How does it relate to the general political pressure now on district attorneys to be, quote-unquote, progressive prosecutors?

David: I think the case was not new in that. It wasn't a surprise all of a sudden, the conviction integrity unit formed and they realize this is a problematic case. This is something that went back years of advocacy to try to get these guys free. The Village Voice did a news report on many of the problems in 2007. The Nation followed up with another big report on many of the problems in 2014. It was only, as George mentioned, when these two documents emerged that showed that prosecutors were hiding this key exculpatory evidence, that kind of served as a smoking gun.

It was just basically a random bit of luck that these documents even emerged. Another attorney working on a separate wrongful conviction case received it by accident and shared it with the attorneys for Bell, Bolt and Johnson, the three men who were recently freed. The prosecutors who handled that case, still active until very recently. One Brad Leventhal that George mentioned, he was serving as Homicide Bureau Chief until just a few days ago, when he decided to resign and resign under pressure from people in the community and local elected officials.

I think that points to while there have been changes in the DA's office, most importantly, probably the conviction integrity unit, many of the people who worked in the previous administration and who were involved in this case in that wrongful conviction, are still there. That raises questions about the culture change and about the commitment to reform in the office.

Brian: Do I understand correctly, David, that though the convictions were thrown out, the three were not exonerated exactly under the law? Now, DA Katz has a decision to make. She could either retry the cases, or let it drop. What's the range of possibilities here? What would any of the possibilities say about her or the facts of this case?

David: That's basically it, what you said there. She can retry these three men. There has been so much activism in the community among local elected officials, especially among Black leaders, who really urged Katz to consent to reverse these convictions. Yet, she consented to reverse the conviction but gave another 90 days, until early June, to say whether she will try to retry them. This is going to become an issue once more, especially if the DA's office does decide to retry the three men. There's compelling evidence that other people committed the crimes.

As George said, there was an infamous stickup crew, they called it the speed Stick Gang, that was responsible for similar armed robberies around the same time and in the same area. Advocates for George Bell, Rohan Bolt, and Gary Johnson are saying that they should investigate the other lead here and other likely killers.

Brian: Now we're going to expand this to how much of a progressive prosecutor Melinda Katz is turning out to be as Queens DA. Listeners, we invite you to help us report this story with WNYC's George Joseph from our race and justice unit and David Brand from the Queens Daily Eagle. Are you an attorney, maybe a defense attorney who works in the Queens courts, and have any opinion about how Melinda Katz is doing on a progressive prosecutor spectrum? Anything else you want to say or add, anybody who's been subject to prosecution by the Queens DA's office since she was elected.

What would you say in terms of the issues of what makes a progressive prosecutor in 2021, after she barely beat the poster progressive prosecutor candidate in that race, Tiffany Cabán? 646-435-7280. We invite your phone calls or your tweets. David Brand, to launch this last portion of the conversation, where does Katz lie based on your reporting at the Queens Daily Eagle on that spectrum that, let's say, runs from her very traditional predecessor, Richard Brown to, say, Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, known for his reform agenda as district attorney there?

David: Well, I think if Krasner represents radical transformation, and Richard Brown represented hardline status quo, tough on crime mentality, I think Katz is somewhere in the middle. She's definitely brought a lot of changes to the office, it is more incremental and moderate change. Most of all, she established that conviction integrity unit. The issue when you establish a conviction integrity unit to start looking at the cases that have problems, then you might find problems with some of the people currently working in the office. There are many people still working in the office in high-ranking roles who were from the previous administration.

That doesn't necessarily mean that they were instrumental in that previous culture, it depends on the individual. She's elevated women and people of color to positions of power, when that office was predominantly white men in the highest-ranking roles. She has committed to reviewing all one-witness cases, which is a problem. Wrongful convictions relying on a lone witness who may have a dubious recollection. That's something that we saw even in some of these other wrongful convictions that the conviction integrity unit has handled. There has been definitely some changes, some incremental changes, less of a radical transformation than I think a lot of progressives in the borough would hope for and that a lot of justice reformers would hope for.

Brian: Other than personnel changes in the office, what would you say makes a progressive prosecutor? Is it on what small crimes they decline to prosecute so as not to expand mass incarceration of mostly Black and Brown young people? Is it not asking for bail in cases where bail still applies? Again, nonviolent, relatively small things. What actually are the main benchmarks of how progressive a prosecutor is?

David: I think that's the things you mentioned. Definitely are not asking for bail. That was an issue early on, because Katz on the campaign trail said that she would not ask for bail under any circumstances and hasn't followed through on that commitment. Declined to prosecute low-level offences. It's progressive prosecutor one-on-one. Justice formers say that they want to see prosecutors not seek the highest possible sentence or not force someone to plead guilty to an offence before allowing them to enter rehabilitative services or treatment programs, and instead not make that a condition of a guilty plea. Maybe George wants to add a little more to that on the perspective of progressive prosecutors?

Brian: I was just going to ask.

George: Well, I would just say, Brian, for this case in particular, it shows Katz's middle path here. On the one hand, she did lead an investigation to this case, her office did agree to vacate the convictions. On the other hand, they haven't followed through on the calls from leaders to now take another step and review every single case touched by the prosecutors who ended up getting this wrongful conviction. On Twitter, the opponent she defeated, Tiffany Cabán, called for that. We see this middle ground where she is vacating the convictions, but she's not necessarily taking the next step of now delving even further into every single case these prosecutors in her office touched.

Brad Leventhal, as David mentioned, this top homicide prosecutor continued to be homicide prosecutor under her watch, even though he had had a previous misconduct finding by courts. There is some institutional continuity here, even as Katz has transformed the office, bringing in a new executive leadership team, bringing in new personnel across the board. it's a middle ground.

Brian: Tia in Queens-

David: I would say what George has said points to the internal politics versus the external politics because if you want to build trust among the people working for you, that you depend on in a huge office, maybe you have to make some concessions or try to appease people within the office. Meanwhile, there's the external politics saying, "What are you doing? Why not review this person's cases? A judge said he committed egregious and deliberate misconduct." You're starting to see that more from community leaders and elected officials calling on her to do more.

Brian: Tia in Queens, you're on WNYC. Hi Tia.

Tia: Hi, good morning, Brian. Hi everyone. I'm calling just to encourage listeners in Queens to put pressure on Katz to review all of Brad Leventhal's cases. I wanted to amplify one case in particular, which is the case of Chanel Lewis, who was a young developmentally disabled man who was convicted of the murder of Karina Vetrano in Howard Beach. Brad Levinthal was the prosecutor there. Chanel says that it was a false confession. The night that he confessed without a lawyer, without his parents, he was 20 years old. He was in the police precinct in Howard Beach for over eight hours and he had never spent a night away from home.

He was told that if he confessed that he'd be able to go home and be with his mom. He's currently upstate and really suffering in prison. This is a sweet, kind, young man who was wrongfully convicted. I just wanted to uplift that particular case as a case that needs to be looked at because of the proven corruption of Brad Leventhal. Katz needs to review all those cases. It's unacceptable for her to cherry pick what she's going to look at while not tackling the systemic issue, which is the broad corruption and collusion between the NYPD and the Queens DA's office often to frame Black and Brown and poor and immigrant people in Queens.

Brian: Tia thank you for your call. George Joseph obviously the caller made some assertions about the defendant being wrongfully convicted, about the prosecutor being corrupt, about systemic corruption that other people that have other opinions on. Have you reported on the Chanel Lewis case enough to put some additional context on that?

George: I will actually turn that to David because David specifically reported on the Chanel Lewis case. Before I do, I could give broader context, which is that for decades under Richard Brown and his predecessor, appellate courts admonished Queens prosecutors for misconduct more than a hundred times. Almost never according to personnel files that we obtained and that other attorneys have reviewed, did the Queens district attorney's office then take the next step of actually doing formal discipline for those prosecutors who were subject to these findings.

Now, the DA's office will often say, "We disagreed with what the judge said in that case. We stand by our prosecutor." The very minimal discipline over many years, civil rights attorneys have for years argued in Queens, led to a culture of impunity in the office where people were rewarded for winning cases but not necessarily punished for crossing the line in the appellate court's view. I'll turn that over to David regarding Chanel Louis.

David: To George's point, I think there was that they get criticized for the win at all cost mentality. That has come up in some of these Bronco convictions by pursuing one specific theory of a case, maybe at the expense of other theories. When it came to the Chanel Louis retrial, because there was a hung jury at the first trial, the judge ordered a new trial a few months later. There was information that emerged right at the very end that the police were pursuing a different lead where I think they had said two jacked up white guys were seen as potential suspects.

Then ultimately the case shifted to focus on Chanel Lewis, who was a young, small, well, skinny, Black and 20 years old, 21 years old. There's questions about what happened to that initial investigation. There were questions about how they use that case to get DNA evidence from 300 Black men in and around Howard Beach, just knocking on their doors and "asking" them to give DNA evidence and then storing that DNA evidence. The way that they ultimately came upon Chanel Louis as a suspect in the case was six months later a detective in the area had a hunch that he remembered seeing a young black man walking around Howard Beach and being suspicious of him.

He looked up to person's information, turned out to be Chanel Louis. They went to his house, took a DNA sample, found that it matched trace DNA on Karina Vetrano's body. There are definitely questions with that case and with that prosecution and it became a flash point because of the racial issues, young Black man accused of randomly killing a white woman who was jogging in a secluded area. Obviously it reminded people of past cases like the Central Park Five case. I think right there was going to be a hot button case. Going through the appeals process now, I think it's going to be interesting to see how Brad Leventhal, who was the main trial prosecutor on that case, now resigning from the office after a judge accused him and his colleagues of deliberate and egregious misconduct, if that's going to have an impact on this high profile case and on other cases that he handled.

Brian: Tom in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi Tom.

Tom: Hi. My name is Tom Hoffman. Basically, I do practice in Queens and I have worked on exoneration cases. What I want to mention, if we do want to make some changes, we do have a very good appointment of two people at the conviction review unit, which are Jerry Dean and Alexis Celestin. They are the ones who reinvestigated this case and recommended that the conviction be set aside. The problem is there is not sufficient staffing of this conviction review unit to reinvestigate, I believe they have 80 cases, to efficiently reinvestigate these cases. If DA Katz wants to make a difference, she needs to staff the CRU so that they could look at all of these cases.

We must remember that Queens hardly exonerated anybody over 30 or 40 years. None, maybe three or four. It's a serious problem. We know there have been many wrongful convictions and we need to have that office sufficiently staffed to do its job. I also want to thank-

Brian: Tom can I ask you something as an attorney who's involved in these issues? This is going to be our closing topic. George and David, you can both weigh in briefly. Is there any system in place to hold prosecutors accountable for wrongful convictions on their watch? It's one thing if it's shown that it's corruption and really willful, but what about consequences for prosecutors who wrongfully put people behind bars?

Tom: If I may say, I use the more perhaps inflammatory word of motives. These are judicial motives. We have tried and pushed in the state legislature a commission to investigate prosecutorial misconduct, just like they have a commission to investigate judicial misconduct. Yet the prosecutors, especially Robert Masters who was the head of the Queens district attorney's association, fought tooth and nail to stop that commission from being passed.

Brian: Tom, thank you so much for your call. 30 seconds each for last word on this or anything else you want to say, George Joseph?

George: Well, I would say that, right now, that commission is now being reconsidered by Albany. There is potential movement in the legislature to bring up such a commission. It wouldn't necessarily have disciplinary powers, but would have investigative powers which could create an independent oversight arm not just relying on prosecutor's offices themselves. Advocates argue this commission is necessary because right now the state grievance committees rarely impose discipline, especially public discipline, for prosecutors who break the rules.

Brian: David, last word?

David: I would just say with Tom Hoffman, he is the guy on wrongful conviction cases. He was the one who came up with the documents that George mentioned before, that helped get these three convictions reversed. He's definitely an authority on that. I think we're going to be back in not too long to see what Melinda Katz decides to do with these three men. She agreed to consent to reverse their convictions, hasn't said whether she's going to retry them. I would be very surprised that she did to retry them given all of this evidence pointing to misconduct, severe misconducts by that office, and also pretty compelling evidence that other people committed the crime, allegedly.

I would be surprised if she continued to prosecute them, but I guess we're going to see.

Brian: David Brand is managing editor of the Queens Daily Eagle. George Joseph is investigative reporter with WNYC's race and justice unit and George's story on this case is on Gothamist in print and his reports for the radio have aired yesterday and today on WNYC. Plenty to think about for Manhattanites who have to pick a new district attorney later this year. George and David, thanks so much.

David: Thanks, Brian.

George: Thanks Brian. Hope to play softball with you soon.

Brian: That would be so great. I can't wait.

 

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