“As a public defender, I have seen the way that my clients who are predominantly Black and brown people are treated by the criminal legal system,” she said. But Orlins notes that she is the only candidate with a background as a public defender, so she has spent her “entire career going up against the Manhattan DA’s office.” The crowded field includes other candidates who have never worked as prosecutors, namely civil rights attorney Tahanie Aboushi and Assemblymember Dan Quart. Orlins is making the case that voters need to elect someone who has never been part of what she called the “prosecutorial-industrial complex” to overhaul this system. “This is the system working as designed,” Eliza Orlins, a career public defender who is running for DA in Manhattan, told The Appeal: Political Report about Franco in a Q&A. And when the actions of line prosecutors come under scrutiny, their bosses tend to fight oversight or isolate the allegations. The weight of an officer’s testimony can pressure defendants into taking a prosecutor’s deal rather than challenging the officer at trial. Most of his cases that are being vacated ended in guilty pleas. Franco’s own history shows what prosecutors have to gain from this. The Brooklyn DA had made a similar move a week earlier.īut these rare announcements-targeting one police officer who left behind such an explosive trail-cannot conceal the serial pattern of New York DAs depending on officers they already know to be unreliable in order to keep locking people away, as The Appeal and other outlets have long documented. Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance said on Thursday that he would seek to vacate 100 convictions that were obtained via the work of NYPD officer Joseph Franco, who is indicted for perjury and falsifying testimony. Eliza Orlins, who is running in the June 22 primary, lays out how she would overhaul the “prosecutorial-industrial complex.”
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