Manhattan is just one of 62 counties in New York, but it is different, and not just for being named New York County. The same goes for the Manhattan district attorney, as crime and justice on the island are outsized (including possible cases against former presidents).
The inherent challenges of running an office led over decades by legends Tom Dewey, Frank Hogan and Bob Morgenthau are magnified now. Now, after major legal overhauls in the state’s bail and discovery and speedy-trial laws, and despite incumbent Cy Vance having cut prosecutions in half even as crime declined, cries for reform continue to ring out one year after George Floyd’s murder. With gun violence and homicides and other random violence now on the rise, it is imperative that the next DA make considered judgments about which reforms to implement and why.
Manhattan’s top prosecutor must be an outstanding lawyer and leader, equipped both to continue to dial back prosecutions where appropriate, correct broader ingrained racial imbalances in the application of the criminal law — and make New York’s streets and subways safer, while simultaneously building complex white-collar and corruption and terrorism cases. That candidate is a woman who came here as a Jewish refugee from Iran fleeing persecution, and whose intelligence and skill have lifted her to the pinnacles of American jurisprudence: Tali Farimah Farhadian Weinstein, whom the Daily News enthusiastically endorses in the June 22 Democratic primary.
Who she is, what she’d do
Weinstein has built a nearly unrivaled career of legal achievement. A top student at Yale and then Yale Law, Weinstein was a Rhodes Scholar and a clerk at the U.S. Supreme Court. After serving as a high-ranking aide to the U.S. attorney general, she was a Brooklyn federal prosecutor, handling an important caseload for years before becoming the general counsel to the Brooklyn DA, where she oversaw three bureaus.
But a DA race is not a resume competition. It is, more than anything, a test of judgment.
Weinstein’s plans evince a deep commitment to fairness for all under the eyes of the law, paired with carefully crafted plans to hold accountable those who perpetrate murder, violence, rape and other destabilizing mayhem. In interviews and public appearances, she has demonstrated extreme thoughtfulness, intelligence and empathy for both those accused of crime and those who fall victim to it.
She has detailed ideas for systemic changes, from overhauling the office’s data management processes to dedicating more resources to tackling financial crimes and cyber-crimes like identity theft and credit card fraud — an increasing threat, to which Manhattan’s seniors and immigrants are especially vulnerable.
Her plans to create a new bureau of gender-based violence, to address the fact that 20% of all NYC homicides are domestic-violence-related, and 40% of all felony assaults stem from such intimate violence, constitute a comprehensive, sensitive modernization of a bureau frequently accused of mishandling vulnerable victims of such crimes.
Virtually all the Democrats in the race are running as progressive reformers of the office, and Weinstein is no exception. But while some candidates are proposing extreme abolitionist ideas that erase victims of violent crime, Weinstein’s proposed reforms will address systemic racism in law enforcement and the criminalization of poverty, while acknowledging that the job of the Manhattan DA is to prevent crimes where possible and prosecute them when they happen.
Weinstein believes pretrial detention should be used sparingly, and that cash bail should be eliminated, replaced with a law that allows people arrested remanded into custody only when they pose a safety risk to themselves or others. She supports legislation that would lift the bar on allowing people with felony convictions to serve on juries, and opposes statutory mandatory minimum sentences for certain crimes. She’s promised to weigh the impact on a defendant’s immigration status at each stage of the criminal justice process, and would consider a defendant’s poverty when considering charges that carry fines or fees. She would end the office’s practice of up-charging misdemeanors as felonies.
Weinstein’s husband, Boaz, runs a Wall Street hedge fund and is worth a bundle. Some have raised concerns that as DA she would be conflicted, which is highly unlikely as generally the feds oversee such enforcement via the Department of Justice and SEC. And while she could have easily self-funded her campaign, Bloomberg-style, so far she is raising money in similar increments as other candidates — while limiting donations from defense attorneys to $1, to prevent perceived conflicts like those that entangled Vance.
The rest of the field
That her opponents bend over backward to portray her as a retrograde law-and-order type is more a comment on how unreasonably far left the field tilts than it is on Weinstein. Several seem to be running to be chief public defender, boasting about having never prosecuted a criminal case. Tahanie Aboushi and Eliza Orlins are passionate about striving for justice, but police and prosecutors are not the primary breakers of the peace. Those are the criminals, who, yes, do actually rape and rob and murder and shoot New Yorkers. Aboushi, Orlins and their ideological ally, Dan Quart, of whom the less said the better, should not be DA.
Former Manhattan ADA and current defense lawyer Liz Crotty offers the most traditional approach to law and order, but shows insufficient appreciation for the winds of change blowing in Manhattan.
Lucy Lang, a longtime prosecutor in the Manhattan DA’s office who most recently ran the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution at John Jay College, would make a fine DA. She impressed us, but not as much as Weinstein.
Another contender, Alvin Bragg, has many endorsements, is warmly regarded by many former colleagues, and offers a compelling personal story and career trajectory. From experiencing crime and police harassment as a Black teenager growing up in Harlem to achieving high academic and legal accomplishments, from the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office to becoming the chief deputy state attorney general, to also teaching law.
And in a city where Black people make up 22% of the population but are currently disproportionately both the victims and those mostly likely to be arrested for crimes, Bragg’s lived experience is valuable.
The problem: Although Bragg offers himself as a moderate bridge-builder, a proud prosecutor who is simultaneously an unabashed reformer, and though he has a promising, very thoughtful program to tackle gun violence, in other plans, his stated balance too often gives way to ill-considered commitments.
He has pledged to review all cases in the 30-year career of ADA Linda Fairstein. Fairstein’s actions in the Central Park Five case are fair game and have been pored over endlessly. But no credible claim has yet been made that thousands of sex-crimes convictions she led or oversaw are rotten. Marshaling a small army to reopen them all would be folly, and unfair to rape victims to boot. (Besides, Bragg told us on the phone he would actually apply a “triage” approach, searching for patterns in a small subset of cases and perhaps dropping a comprehensive look back if that first probe yielded nothing damning. That’s not what he’s promised activists.)
Also worrisome are his plans to cease all sex work prosecutions, not just of prostitutes but of johns and pimps. Weinstein would be more circumspect.
Running against incumbent Vance is fine, as Bragg was the first to start his campaign, but he called for the duly elected district attorney to resign. Then what — have the governor pick someone?
In his memo of “Day 1″ actions as DA, posted on his website for months, Bragg says he would order his assistants not to file a “predicate felony” statement except in extreme cases. That, we learned, is flatly illegal. When we raised the error with Bragg, he admitted the flub and said the line was being edited out.
But getting the law wrong is a consequential mistake for a would-be DA, as is setting a rigid rule that all but a handful of crimes will have a presumption of pretrial release, with a poorly defined asterisk for extraordinary circumstances. Ditto for his plans to go easier on offenders all the way up to the age of 25, far past the recently raised age of criminal responsibility in New York.
Manhattan needs a DA who can both prosecute criminals and prosecute consequential reforms. Tali Farhadian Weinstein is the one.
