The Center for Constitutional Rights slammed the NYPD today over the leak of an internal report from the mayor’s office apparently finding Judge Shira Scheindlin biased against law enforcement.

Scheindlin has a long history of covering stop-and-frisk related cases, and is presiding over a major one currently. The Center of Constitutional Rights is on one side of that case; the NYPD and the City are on the other.

The report was apparently leaked to the New York Daily News. According to the News, the report found that Scheindlin decided against law enforcement in 60 percent of her written opinions on “search-and-seizure” over the course of her nearly two decades on the bench. The study allegedly also says that rate is the highest among 16 current and former Manhattan federal judges that the report included since 1990.

The mayor’s office reportedly declined to comment to the News, but Scheindlin told the News that the study is “completely misleading” as it doesn’t include any rulings from the bench.

While the majority of her written opinions may involve dismissing evidence, she told the News that in “nearly all” of her bench rulings on seized evidence, she has denied motions to suppress.

Early this year, the judge ruled on a case involving stops in some Clean Halls buildings. She ordered that the stops cease, but a short time later rescinded that ruling.

CCR released a statement calling the report “nothing short of outrageous.”

“Having already attacked the Center for Constitutional Rights, communities mobilizing to end violent and discriminatory policing, and the press, the attack on a respected judge scrapes the bottom of the litigation barrel,” the statement read.

CCR recommended that the city instead focus on “studies to remedy the persistent constitutional violations in its police department.”

NYPD spokesman Paul Browne did not immediately respond to a request for comment as to whether the NYPD was responsible for the leak, as CCR’s statement implied.

Follow Danielle Tcholakian on Twitter @danielleiat

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After the release of David Ranta, wrongfully convicted of the murder of a Hasidic rabbi 23 years ago, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office has decided to review 50 murder convictions facilitated by retired NYPD Detective Louis Scarcella.

In a recent exposé, the New York Times dug into Scarcella’s conviction history and discovered that, among other questionable moves, he used the same crack addict as a witness in six separate homicide investigations.

Scarcella is also accused of letting prisoners out of jail to smoke crack cocaine in exchange for testimony fingering Ranta for the murder of Rabbi Chaskell Werzberger, an Auschwitz survivor.

Werzberger was shot by a panicked jewel thief in a robbery gone wrong.

Follow Danielle Tcholakian on Twitter @danielleiat

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This week marks National Crime Victims’ Rights Week, and the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office held their yearly VOICE OUT event to honor victims of violence. This year’s specific theme, gun violence, is especially timely given the defeat of several gun control measures in the U.S. Senate last week, as well as the mass shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut shortly before Christmas.

District Attorney Charles J. Hynes, who regards his job as “an advocate for victims,” slammed the Senate for what he called “a total lack of courage.”

“The Senate shamefully failed us,” he said. “Not to pass legislation that would prevent guns from being in the hands of seriously mentally ill people or convicted felons, how in the name of God do they justify not voting for that legislation?”

Hynes said guns are responsible for an overwhelming majority of the homicides his office prosecutes.

“It’s always been 75 percent,” he explained. “When we were losing 760 people a year it was 75 percent; last year we went under 150 murders for the first time since 1960, but it’s still 75 percent.”

And according to Hynes, the vast majority of guns used in these crimes come from out of state, making federal legislation actually very relevant to the safety of New Yorkers.

“Now it’s really up to the public,” Hynes said. “I would hope that the people wherever these folks are from, wherever they represent, will stand up and say, ‘We need someone else to represent us.’”

The event’s three speakers had an intimate understanding of the ramifications of guns on New York City streets.

Robin Lyde lost her son Benny—a model oldest brother, she said—when he was 21 years old.

The night he was shot, she heard the gunfire from her bedroom.

“When I heard it, I was petrified because I had children downstairs,” she said. She ran into the living room to check on her young twins and their friends. “I looked at everyone and said thank you God, everyone is OK.”

But she was compelled to look outside, as the gunshot had been so close, and there she saw her eldest son in a pool of blood on the street.

Lyde said part of what keeps her going is the work she is doing to try to stop gun violence.

“I am out there begging our young people, our old people, not to pick up a gun, not to take lives,” she said.

Yvette Bell, with her daughter Nyree Stevens-Credle in a wheelchair besides her, spoke of the night Nyree was shot in the neck. The bullet lodged in Nyree’s spine and she was paralyzed from the neck down.

Nyree was in Brooklyn and her mother was in the Bronx when Bell got a 4 a.m. phone call from someone who said, “I don’t know who you are, but your daughter is lying in the street, she’s been shot.”

It was Christmas night and, unable to find a taxi, Bell took the longest train and bus trip of her life, she said, desperate to get to her daughter, worried she would die alone.

And Diana Carnival, whose husband was shot in an armed robbery at his car dealership, addressed women who may be going through what she went through.

“I’m sure you feel so lost right now,” she said, cautioning that the journey they faced would not be easy, that it will be a day-by-day process to get to “the light at the end of the tunnel.”

“Courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says I will do it again tomorrow,” she said.

Her children wanted to come to the event with her, they told her, because there would be other families like them there, and maybe other children too.

“It took this day for my children to realize that we are not alone in this situation, that there are other people like us,” Carnival said.

Ultimately, the event is meant to provide catharsis to those whose lives have been shaken by gun violence.

And it seems to work, as the women who spoke of their loss left the event smiling, touching one another’s shoulders, and calling out hellos to the DA staff who helped them through what many describe as an incomprehensible experience.

“Anytime you need me to speak anywhere,” Yvette Bell said, hugging District Attorney Hynes goodbye.

“You’re terrific,” he replied, holding her hand in both of his. “You’re very courageous.”

Follow Danielle Tcholakian on Twitter @danielleiat

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The Manhattan District Attorney will not be prosecuting the NYPD cops who were caught on video pepper-spraying and punching Occupy Wall Street protesters, the DA’s office announced on Friday.

The cops in question are two Deputy Inspectors, Anthony Bologna and Johnny Cardona.

In video footage that surfaced in late 2011, Bologna was seen liberally pepper-spraying a seemingly calm crowd in Union Square on September 24, and Cardona was captured punching a protester named Felix Rivera-Pitre in the face in the Financial District on October 14.

Bologna was reportedly docked 10 vacation days, and Cardona was cleared by the department.

According to a law enforcement source, the decision not to prosecute was based on evidence involving the time before and after the video recordings, which reportedly called into question the criminality of the officers’ actions.

“After a thorough investigation … we cannot prove these allegations criminally beyond a reasonable doubt,” said Manhattan DA chief spokeswoman Erin Duggan.

Roy Richter, Captains Endowment Association President praised the decision to the Daily News, and hailed Cardona as “a true victim of the [Occupy Wall Street] fiasco.” Cardona needed hip- and knee-replacement surgery due to injuries sustained during a demonstration.

Richter also said that Bologna “did nothing that rises to the level of criminal conduct.”

Ron Kuby, an attorney who pressed for assault charges on behalf of victims in both cases, condemned the DA’s decision, particularly in light of the office taking ”almost 19 months to decide he would do nothing.”

“Despite the overwhelming proof on videotape, seen around the world, Cy Vance Jr. has shown that he will do nothing to disturb his cozy relationship with the police, even in the face of the clearest wrongdoing,” Kuby complained to the Daily News.

Duggan pointed out to Metro that the DA’s Office has prosecuted more than a dozen police officers since 2010.

Among those are an NYPD Lieutenant David Chee, who pleaded guilt to making harassing phone calls in January 2011, NYPD Officer Shawn Jenkins who conspired to burglarize an apartment where a drug kingpin had hidden a large amount of money, and NYPD Sergeant Williams Eiseman, who pleaded guilty to perjury for lying under oath and conducting illegal searches and seizures.

Follow Danielle Tcholakian on Twitter @danielleiat

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A potentially history-making trial is in its fourth week in federal court in lower Manhattan, as Judge Shira Scheindlin hears testimony from both sides of the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practice: the officers doing the stopping, and the New Yorkers they’re frisking.

In previous weeks, Scheindlin heard testimony from a suspended police officer, Adhyl Polanco, and listened to secretly-recorded tapes made by a former Brooklyn officer, both apparently indicating a quota system or, at minimum, informal pressure from superiors to increase stops, arrests, and summonses.

The judge heard from Cornelio McDonald today, a New Yorker who had experienced a stop-and-frisk, as well as one of the officers who stopped him, Edward French.

Cornelio McDonald spent most of the day on December 18, 2009 caring for his mother — feeding her, helping her shower, fixing up the house, he said — at her apartment across the street from his own home in Fresh Meadows, Queens. He left around 1 a.m., and as he weaved between cars parked alongside the median dividing the two lanes of Parsons Boulevard, an unmarked red van a little ways away pulled a U-turn and stopped in front of him. When the occupants demanded to know where he was coming from, McDonald, feeling “trapped” between two parked cars and the van in front of him, replied, ”What are you stopping me for?”

When Scheindlin asked if the police ever told him why they got out of the van and patted him down, McDonald said they never mentioned the “suspicious bulge” French later described.

Scheindlin persisted, “They didn’t give you any reason?”

“They said it was to protect themselves,” he said.

Pressed by attorneys as to how the stop made him feel, he replied, “Embarassed. Ashamed.”

By McDonald’s account, he was stopped for no other reason than his race.

According to French, Mc Donald appeared suspicious because he was walking with his hands in his coat pockets, pressed to his body. McDonald asserted that he was trying to keep warm on a 20 or 30 degree December night.

The city pointed to other lawsuits in which McDonald alleged racial bias, including one against the U.S. Postal Service, accusing them of job discrimination after he was fired.

“It’s not the first time you believed a government entity has discriminated against you for your race, correct?” a city attorney asked.

After questioning how McDonald moved his body between his cars, and whether or not his responding to the stopped van with “why are you stopping me” meant he knew the plainclothes occupants were police, the city had one last question.

“Is it true you consider every interaction with a police officer a stop? You consider it a stop every time an officer says hello?” the attorney asked.

“Yes,” he responded without hesitation.
Follow Danielle Tcholakian on Twitter @danielleiat

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The murder trial of David Tarloff, accused of killing psychologist Kathyrn Faughey on February 12, 2008, was ruled a mistrial today, as the jury informed the presiding judge, Justice Edward McLaughlin, that they were at a deadlock.

Tarloff, who is a diagnosed schizophrenic, attacked the Upper East Side psychologist five years ago in the office she shared with his former psychiatrist, Kent Shinbach, who had not treated him in 17 years.

The jury had previously insisted they were at a deadlock on two separate occasions, and both times McLaughlin directed them to continue deliberating.

On Tuesday, however, McLaughlin announced, “I’m willing to say we’re finished,” the New York Times reported.

The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has already vowed to retry the case.

If convicted, Tarloff would face up to life in prison. If the insanity defense is accepted, he would be taken to a secure psychiatric facility, possibly for the rest of his life.

The attack

Court-appointed defense attorneys did not challenge that Tarloff killed Faughey, but maintained that he was not mentally well enough on the day of the attack to comprehend that it was wrong.

Tarloff has been in psychiatric care intermittently since 1991.

Evan Krutoy, an attorney at the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, said the robbery was meticulously pre-meditated, and that the fact that Tarloff attempted to hide what he had done and escape proved he knew he had done something wrong.

Tarloff intended to rob Shinbach for money to take his mother from a nursing home to Hawaii, where he wanted to care for her himself.

The defense argued that he believed God wanted him to do it.

Tarloff reportedly told police that he was surprised to see Faughey when he arrived at the office.

He beat her in the head with a mallet and stabbed her repeated in the chest with a knife.

When Shinbach went to help Faughey, Tarloff attacked him as well.

Faughey died on her office floor.

Deadlock

After listening to three weeks of testimony at the State Supreme Court in Manhattan, the jury was unable to come to a conclusive decision on the insanity defense.

Jurors sent McLaughlin notes on two separate occasions insisting they were deadlocked; the judge ordered them to keep on both times.

The first note, sent last Thursday, was seven days into jury deliberations. The Times reported that yelling could be heard anytime the door to the jury room door opened.

At that time, McLaughlin read the jury an Allen charge: a script directing them to continue deliberating and set aside opinions held for pride or other unsound reasons.

Jurors were reportedly visibly angry; some even rolled their eyes.

McLaughlin expressed empathy over the difficulty of the task.

But, he said, “it was not intended to be any other way.”

Forensic psychologist, lawyer and professor Charles Ewing told the Times he was surprised that cases involving insanity defenses didn’t result in hung juries more often, as the jurors are charged with the challenge of gauging the testimony of conflicting experts.

“A hung jury may simply mean that the jurors could not agree on the morality of punishing someone who is clearly mentally ill, regardless of whether he meets the high legal standard for insanity,” Ewing explained.

The jury had at one point asked to have expert testimony reread, and spent almost a full day hearing expert opinions for a second time.

They had also previously asked McLaughlin to repeat his explanations of the requirements to prove insanity, and of the consequences of hung jury.

One juror had asked to go home on account of “negative attitudes” among the other jurors. She ultimately stayed.

To prove insanity, it is not enough for the defendant to have been under psychiatric care for a lifetime; the jury must be persuaded that Tarloff did not understand that his actions would kill Faughey and that it was wrong to attack her.

The Times pointed out that this defense is used very infrequently: out of 5,910 murder cases in New York state in the past decade, only seven defendants have been found at trial not responsible for reason of mental disease or defect.

Follow Danielle Tcholakian on Twitter @danielleiat

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Brooklyn Judge Arthur Schack has heaped fees and fines on Christopher Earl Strunk for a lawsuit seeking to prove President Barack Obama ineligible as a candidate based on allegations that he was not born in the United States.

Schack called the 2011 lawsuit “fanciful, delusional, and irrational.”

According to the NY Daily News, Strunk is a “prominent birther,” and believes that Obama’s presidency is the result of a conspiracy hiding his true birthplace.

The judge blasted Strunk’s allegation of a ”massive conspiracy to defraud American voters [that] was perpetrated by hundreds of individuals, at the behest of the Roman Catholic Church and especially the Jesuits.”

Strunk has filed over 20 lawsuits and appeals in state and federal court, often, as in this case, naming Obama himself as a defendant.  New York’s Board of Elections is among a host of other defendants.

“If the complaint in this action was a movie script, it would be entitled ‘The Manchurian Candidate Meets the Da Vinci Code,’” wrote Schack.

Schack said the $167,707 in attorney fees, plus a $10,000 sanction, were for bringing a ’frivolous suit’ and wasting the court’s time, the Daily News reported.

The fees will go to the three law firms that opposed Strunk in the suit.

“I’m going to have this thing overturned and I’m not going to pay a dime,” Strunk insisted.

Follow Danielle Tcholakian on Twitter @danielleiat

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Vilma Ramirez, 35, who came to the U.S. from El Salvador, filed papers in Manhattan court on March 7 to force the return of her 1-month-old girl after signing adoption papers that she claimed to misunderstand. Ramirez, a cook with three other children, decided to put her baby up for adoption and signed away guardianship in December. She thought she would be able to have contact with the child, she said.

“I really did not understand the legal language,” Ramirez told the NY Post.

“If I had been advised that I would never see Esperanza [her daughter] again, I never would have signed any consent." A Supreme Court judge decided last week that the case should be transferred to Manhattan Surrogate Court.

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In a case pitting free speech versus privacy rights, the nation’s highest court held that the picketing at a private funeral and even hurtful protest messages were protected by the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.

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Prosecutors argue Minor is a “callous” contract killer.

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According to a civil lawsuit filed in Manhattan on Wednesday, Swift claims that he had a verbal agreement with Rappaport, his former fiancee: She would pay $142,500 for the land at 377 Little Noyac Path and he’d foot the $2.6-million-dollar bill for construction costs.

The home was completed in 2006 and when the couple ended their eight-year relationship last year, Swift was kicked to the curb.

Meanwhile, Rappaport insists the house was a gift.

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After being arrested, Kenneth Minor, 36, told police that the stabbing was an assisted suicide that he’d pre-arranged with the victim, Jeffrey Locker, 52, of Woodmere. Minor may ask a judge to exclude his confession next week before the trial begins, DNAinfo reported.

At the time of his death, Locker — a motivational speaker who gave workshops on dealing with stress, frustration and anxiety in the workplace — was allegedly heavily in debt and had purchased a $20 million life insurance plan several weeks before being killed.

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