Village Justice Tom Liotti
Prosecutors come and go but their designs on higher office for themselves often take them into unchartered prosecutions of elected officials. Since the days of Tammany Hall in the 19th Century these prosecutions have routinely occurred. Tom Dewey cacheted his position as Manhattan’s District Attorney into a Governorship and Presidential nomination. Louis Freeh went from being an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Manhattan in the Pizza Connection case to a federal judgeship and then became F.B.I. Director. Rudolph Giuliani took his position as a federal prosecutor to the Mayoralty and a bid for a Presidential nomination. James Comey has traded up his role as Southern District Chief Federal prosecutor to F.B.I. Director. Marc Mukasey went from prosecutor to Chief Judge to Attorney General of the United States. Kathleen Rice, a state prosecutor, has traded her laurels for a seat in Congress. The list goes on with prosecutors claiming to take on political corruption and a system of which they are a part.
While the system has flaws within it we need to be careful of prosecutors who embark on a moral crusade in order to feather their own nests. For example, in the early 1970’s Governor Nelson Rockefeller had a very bad idea. He appointed Maurice Nadjari as a Special Prosecutor essentially to root out corruption in the City of New York. Nadjari’s misguided prosecutions became legendary with most being tossed for innumerable Constitutional violations.
Elected officials become targets for prosecutors on the hunt to build names for themselves. Business as usual suddenly becomes a crime. Two former Speakers of the Assembly Mel Miller and Stanley Fink; the Minority Leader of the New York State Senate, Manfred Orenstein and the Majority Leader of the New York State Senate, Joseph Bruno, were each tortured by improper prosecutions only to have them later thrown out. Former United States Senator Ted Stevens lost his seat but was posthumously vindicated after the Attorney General admitted to prosecutorial misconduct in not disclosing exculpatory evidence. Assemblyman Armand D’Amato, the Senator’s brother, had his conviction reversed on appeal.
Joe Margiotta, a former GOP Leader went to jail for splitting municipal insurance commissions, a practice long in use throughout the nation by both Democrats and Republicans. The prosecutor struggled to find a legal theory in order to prosecute. He did so under the Hobbs Act, a labor racketeering statute. After the conviction the prosecutor became a federal judge.
The law can be both used and abused. Taxpayers wind up paying for misguided prosecutions. Judge Valerie Caproni, a former federal prosecutor herself was right to criticize prosecutors for their “perp walk” and pre-trial publicity campaign against Speaker Silver but that is not enough to stop the practice of ex post facto prosecutions for actions that have been in use for decades by all political parties. To be fair, change the laws to comport with evolving mores but do not prosecute elected officials with novel legal theories that are unprecedented. Business as usual does not suddenly become criminal just because prosecutors say so.
