NYY657545 t1_je9r85k wrote on March 30, 2023 at 1:24 PM

Judge Criticizes D.A. for Halting Prosecution of Woman in Husband’s Death Alvin L. Bragg, Manhattan’s district attorney, abandoned the murder case against Tracy McCarter. Justice Diane Kiesel cast a critical eye on the politics surrounding the case.

Image A woman sits at a courtroom table flanked by attorneys. Tracy McCarter said she and her husband were “victims of the cruel disease of alcoholism.” Credit...Jefferson Siegel for The New York Times Jonah E. Bromwich By Jonah E. Bromwich Dec. 2, 2022 A New York judge on Friday sharply criticized the Manhattan district attorney for declining to move forward with the murder trial of a woman who was arrested in 2020 after her estranged husband died of a stab wound, while reluctantly dismissing the case.

The dismissal of the case against the woman, Tracy McCarter, was issued by the State Supreme Court judge, Diane J. Kiesel, after the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, said in a letter last month that he could not allow the case to go forward.

Justice Kiesel, in unusually personal terms, blasted Mr. Bragg’s decision, noting the political pressure on him from Ms. McCarter’s many supporters, and saying that “sufficient questions of fact surround this case, crying out for the opportunity to be answered at a trial.”

“The court finds no compelling reason to dismiss the indictment, but for the district attorney’s unwillingness to proceed,” she wrote. “It is not in the interest of justice for the court to engage in a futile and unseemly standoff with the district attorney.”

ADVERTISEMENT But Justice Kiesel noted that Mr. Bragg could still seek a manslaughter charge against Ms. McCarter, a 47-year-old nurse, for the death of her husband, James Murray. The district attorney suggested in his letter that the judge had “foreclosed” that option, and said in court that he did not “understand it to be something” that prosecutors could do.

The unusual impasse will persist until at least the beginning of next year or until the district attorney announces a decision. The judge said in her order that she was keeping the case unsealed for 60 days to give the district attorney “the opportunity” to bring further charges, explicitly putting the onus on Mr. Bragg.

“Should the prosecution of this criminal transaction end with this written decision, it will be the district attorney’s choice, and not the result of any dilemma caused by this court,” the judge wrote.

In response to a question Friday about whether the district attorney’s office would charge Ms. McCarter with lesser crimes, including manslaughter, a spokeswoman, Emily Tuttle, said only, “We are reviewing the decision.”

ADVERTISEMENT For the time being, however, Justice Kiesel’s order means that Ms. McCarter is not currently accused of any crime.

“I am innocent,” Ms. McCarter said in a statement Friday. She said that she was devastated that her husband had lost his life, and that she and he both were “victims of the cruel disease of alcoholism.”

“Dismissing the unjust charge against me can’t give back what I’ve lost, but I am relieved that this nightmare will finally be over, and I am determined to thrive once again,” her statement said.

Ms. McCarter was arrested in 2020 and was charged by Mr. Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr.

Her case began to attract public attention after she revealed when she was charged by prosecutors that she had been a victim of domestic violence. The publicity increased after her lawyers presented video and documentary evidence that Mr. Murray, who was 48 when he died, had been abusive toward Ms. McCarter for years.

ADVERTISEMENT And Mr. Bragg, while he was running for office as part of a movement of prosecutors emphasizing the importance of fairness in the justice system, noted that and voiced support for Ms. McCarter as part of his campaign, tweeting “I #StandWithTracy. Prosecuting a domestic violence survivor who acted in self-defense is unjust.”

(In a radio interview last month, Mr. Bragg said that his tweet was “a general assertion about survivors in the context of Ms. McCarter’s case” and that in retrospect, he should not have said it.)

Justice Kiesel also noted in her order that an organization that gave a substantial financial donation to Mr. Bragg, Color of Change, printed an advertisement in The New York Times calling on Mr. Bragg to drop the charges.

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Ms. McCarter’s supporters turned her case into a cause, and donated to the district attorney.Credit...Jefferson Siegel for The New York Times The judge hedged her political criticism, writing “To be clear, this court has no evidence of a quid pro quo and accepts the district attorney’s representation that he made his decision to drop the charges after independently reviewing the case.”

ADVERTISEMENT But she quoted a letter from Mr. Murray’s brother, Steven Murray, in which he wrote, “the D.A.’s actions have been focused solely on the defendant and not on seeking the truth and obtaining justice for Jim.”

In a separate interview this week, before the charge was dismissed, Steven Murray said, “All we want is to go to trial. We’ll live with the result.”

He said he did not believe Ms. McCarter’s version of events and that he had received a phone call from Mr. Bragg before the district attorney filed his letter.

ADVERTISEMENT Mr. Murray said he told the district attorney: “We’re not sitting here asking you to put Tracy away for the rest of her life, but she is clearly taking no responsibility for her actions, which resulted in my brother’s death, my niece not having a father anymore.”

The judge’s letter was also unusual for drawing on evidence that was not set to be presented by lawyers at trial, and for including a quote from the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John G. Roberts Jr.

“While I disagree with some of the reasoning in the decision, we are of course relieved that the case has been dismissed and that Ms. McCarter can begin to go on with her life,” said a lawyer for Ms. McCarter, Tess M. Cohen. “I hope that everyone can agree that a prosecutor who has a reasonable doubt about a case, like D.A. Bragg did here, should always dismiss.”

Jonah E. Bromwich covers criminal justice in New York, with a focus on the Manhattan district attorney's office, state criminal courts in Manhattan and New York City's jails. @jonesieman

NYY657545 t1_iyeyqxg wrote on November 30, 2022 at 10:03 PM

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NYY657545 t1_ixqjmn6 wrote on November 25, 2022 at 3:08 PM

Reply to comment by [deleted] in What to Know Now That the N.Y.P.D. Is on Amazon’s Neighborhood Watch App by k1lk1

What concerns have activists raised about racial profiling and police surveillance?

Three years ago, Vice news spent two months tracking the content of the app within a five-mile area covering Lower Manhattan, most of Brooklyn, and parts of Queens and Hoboken, N.J., and found that people of color made up the majority of posts tagged as “suspicious activity.”

It echoed a pattern of concerning behavior that had plagued other neighborhood watch platforms, like Nextdoor and Citizen, which civil liberty groups had warned could give a false impression of rising crime and lead to racial profiling and wrongful arrests.

“The N.Y.P.D. is effectively deputizing app users,” Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said about Neighbors. “Crowdsourced surveillance and suspicion, like the kind that takes place on Ring’s Neighbors app, is influenced by users’ racial biases and other prejudices.”

The city Police Department, which developed one of the country’s most sophisticated surveillance apparatuses after 9/11, has a well-documented history of surveilling minority communities. .

In 2018, the Police Department settled a lawsuit over the surveillance of Muslims in New Jersey through a decade-long spying program in which officers eavesdropped on conversations in cafes and designated mosques as potential terrorist organizations. According to the suit, police officers collected license plates and took video and photographs at mosques as part of their covert surveillance.

And in a 2021 report, Amnesty International detailed the police’s capacity to view footage from over 15,000 CCTV cameras installed across Bronx, Manhattan and Brooklyn alone, with a disproportionate number of those cameras located in communities of color.

The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a privacy and civil rights group based in New York, has condemned the police’s partnership with Neighbors.

“This sort of crowdsourced surveillance will only lead to more wrongful arrests, racial profiling and police violence,” Albert Fox Cahn, the organization’s executive director, said in a press statement. “Most New Yorkers would second guess installing these home surveillance tools if they understood how easily these systems could be used against them and their families by police.”