Government

Brooklyn Beats Crime By Cleaning Records Tied To Dirty Cops

All of this could have been prevented if they just made the cops pinky swear not to plant evidence.

By  
on

lady-justice-geb1a9f632_1920For anyone watching part 6 of Jojo’s Bizzare Adventure, you know that bribing correction officers is a normal occurrence.  And while the dirty cops in the show are set in Florida, things aren’t too far from how some police have been caught doing their jobs in New York. One of the issues raised with the defund police department rhetoric that mysteriously evaporated after elections is that police, despite their job of protecting the innocent, frequently contribute to crime rates. Given how hard it is to take the word of officers who have been convicted of taking bribes or committing perjury, Brooklyn’s D.A. has decided to give about 400 people the benefit of doubt.

The Brooklyn district attorney’s office wants to vacate nearly 400 criminal convictions tied to 13 dirty NYPD officers.

Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said he didn’t find misconduct in the cases, but his prosecutors “no longer have confidence” in the work of the officers — who were convicted of crimes running the gamut from perjury to planting drugs to accepting bribes.

Gonzalez’s office referred to the move as the sixth-largest mass dismissal of convictions in U.S. history.

Some guy crying his eyes out in a jail cell that he’s innocent or that the crack magically found in his pocket wasn’t his is the stuff of movies. And as easy as it is to think it’s the stuff of fantasy, the genre is occasionally documentary.

The majority of the dismissals, 134 in total, were from cases built by former narcotics cop Jerry Bowens, who is serving a 40-year prison sentence after fatally shooting his estranged girlfriend and wounding her friend.

A year before the 2009 shooting, Bowens was indicted on charges he stole crack from drug suspects to give it to informants.

He was one of four cops convicted in a massive scandal involving the Brooklyn South narcotics squad. More than half of the cases Gonzalez is moving to dismiss are linked to those four cops.

Doing the types of things Jerry Bowens was accused of is heinous, and the day that potentially innocent people who were jailed because of a cop’s lawbreaking are freed is a day worth celebrating. Glad to see that someone is taking the original meaning of a few bad apples to heart.

Speaking of Jojo’s, New York would do well to keep this momentum going and stop sending people to solitary confinement for prolonged periods. It is a human rights violation, after all.

Brooklyn District Attorney Moves To Dismiss Nearly 400 Convictions Tied To Dirty NYPD Cops [NY Daily News]

Sponsored

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s.  He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

Sponsored

Topics

, , , ,