Short Take: Cleaning The Queens House

The New York Post laments the actions of the new Queens District Attorney, Melinda Katz.

Incoming Queens DA Melinda Katz is vowing to clean house when she takes office in January, dismissing holdovers from Richard Brown’s near-30-year tenure. Take it as an ominous sign.

The “elections have consequences” slogan cuts both ways, and for Katz, who barely edged out queer Latina public defender Tiffany Cabán because her extremely progressive credentials didn’t have the identity brand behind it, there were doubts that she would be as good as progressives wanted or as bad as conservatives expected.

It’s nuts: The top staffers include acting Queens DA John Ryan, who has served since 1991 and has already said he’ll be leaving; Senior Executive Assistant DA James Quinn, who’s been there for 42 years; and Robert Masters, executive assistant district attorney for the Office’s Legal Affairs Division, a vet since 1990.

These were “Get Down” Brown’s people, and they’ve become legend over their long careers. Whether that’s good or bad depends on which side of Chesterton’s Fence you’re on. But regardless of what comes next, the top staff at the Queens DA’s office had been around long enough. It seems unimaginable that Ryan and Quinn would have stayed even if Katz begged them. Institutional memory is important, particularly when a new DA takes office with no experience as prosecutor whatsoever. But it also makes it very hard to effect change, and Katz was elected to change the office.

My experience with the Queens DA is limited. I hated cases in Queens. It was a pain in the butt to get to, the judges tended to be oddly provincial, but most of all, they had weird policies that existed nowhere else in New York City.

You couldn’t get your defendant arraigned until you had a talk with a prosecutor about plea. I didn’t want to have a talk about plea, and just wanted my case called and my guy out. No deal, I was informed. So, like a dutiful child, I waited my turn to talk with some punk-ass prosecutor, like some sniveling sycophant desperate for his show of mercy. I would be told the offer, turn it down, do the arraignment and get the hell out of Queens.

Then there was the infamous unconstitutional chat prosecutors had with defendants, post-arrest but in the absence of counsel, giving them their “last chance” to snitch before they had a lawyer to step in and tell the prosecutor to shove it.

And there was the 180.80 waiver, where you either waived the statutory requirement that they indict a defendant charged with a felony within 144 hours or they had to cut him loose. If you didn’t waive, they claimed to refuse to make a plea offer to less than the top count. Once indicted, it was top count or nothing. Why anybody caved to this crap is beyond me, as my go-to reply was, “Cool, let’s try this case.”

I suspect there were other peculiar policies in place, and that I just didn’t have enough experience in Queens to know about them. And no doubt they changed over time, which may well have eluded me since it wasn’t my home court. But it was a bad place to defend, and the reason it was bad was because “Get Down” Brown chose to make it bad. Now he’s gone.

Let’s be frank: Katz is erroneously concluding that the public wants a soft-on-crime prosecutor. She’ll be making a big mistake by shifting from the sensible approach Brown took, balancing the need for public safety with the rights of the accused.

I have no clue how far Melinda Katz plans to take things, how many changes are in store or what her new coterie of prosecutors will do in their provincial outpost of Queens. But it was time to put an end to Brown’s peculiar policies.

There was nothing sensible about them, and, as long as we’re being frank, Brown didn’t give a damn about the rights of the accused, which may be why the new prosecutor would either be Katz or Cabán. The public has spoken.

7 thoughts on “Short Take: Cleaning The Queens House

  1. Richard Kopf

    SHG,

    “provincial outpost of Queens?”

    Horace Greeley: “Go west you man!” We’ll show you real provincial in all its idiosyncratic glory. But we’re Nebraska nice.

    All the best.

    RGK

      1. cthulhu

        Puts me in mind of the last episode of the great cop sitcom Barney Miller, where the 12th precinct is getting shut down and all the cops are getting reassigned; Harris’ new assignment is Flushing Meadows, and he proceeds to go on a rant about the undesirability of Queens. My YouTube-fu is failing me though; I can’t find the clip…

  2. DOS

    Be careful what you ask for… While defendants might not be allowed to take an art appreciation class in lieu of a DAT, IMHO Queens is one of the better counties to represent defendants – try getting something done in Nassau.

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