SKIPPING COURT
Prosecutors leaving DA offices in droves
It’s crippling our lawyers . . . You become a file clerk rather than a trial lawyer. — former Manhattan ADA Joan Illuzzi-Orbon, on how criminal justice reforms push out staff
The number of prosecutors fleeing district attorneys’ offices in the city has spiked following the adoption of criminal-justice reforms that have created what one former top prosecutor called “insanity.”
Sixty-five assistant district attorneys, or about 12% of the staff, have resigned so far this year from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office, up from about 44 through the end of March. During all of 2021, 97 assistant DAs quit.
The situation is nearly the same in Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez’s office, where 67 of some 500 prosecutors, or about 13%, have called it quits as of June 17. Another three resigned Thursday, according to a source. By comparison, 84 left in all of 2020 and 94 last year.
In The Bronx, 59 prosecutors have walked from January through May.
Reps from the Queens and Staten Island DAs’ offices did not respond to requests for data.
When Bragg took the helm of the Manhattan office in January, at least nine lawyers quit in the first two weeks, The Post revealed.
Some were spurred to leave, sources said, by Bragg’s soft-oncrime approach, which he outlined in a “Day One” memo directing ADAs to not seek prison sentences for many criminals and to downgrade some felonies to misdemeanors.
Reforms’ role
Sources said state criminal-justice reforms are now playing a greater role in pushing out staff.
New discovery requirements adopted by the state in 2019 are forcing lawyers to turn over reams of material to the defense under tighter time constraints.
“It’s crippling. It’s crippling our lawyers,” said Joan Illuzzi-Orbon, a former veteran Manhattan ADA and trial-division chief who prosecuted movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and won a 2016 conviction in the 1979 kidnapping and murder of 6-year-old Etan Patz in Soho.
With the new rules, she said, “you become a file clerk rather than a trial lawyer.”
For example, Illuzzi-Orbon noted that in a case involving allegations of wrongdoing at a protest, bodycam video from every officer who was at the event might now have to be produced.
“It’s insanity,” she said. “Most of it is completely irrelevant and not germane in any way to the issues of the case.”
She added that if cases take too long, they get tossed.
“There are tons of cases getting dismissed,” she said.
Illuzzi-Orbon, now a fellow with the Manhattan Institute, said she left Bragg’s office in January because she knew he would want to put his own hires in place.
In March testimony to the City Council, Bragg said that due to the unprecedented evidentiary demands, “we’ve experienced record attrition, as our ADAs burned out and sought less demanding jobs for more money.”
Bronx DA Darcel Clark told the City Council in March that those who had left her office “cited the responsibilities of discovery, managing the backlog of cases and increased night and weekend shifts among their main reasons for leaving the office.”
Bragg’s office said it expected to have at least 85 new ADAs in place by the end of September.
In Brooklyn, prosecutors are moving up the ranks to take on felony cases more quickly due to the staffing shortage, a source said.
“Of course it is going to affect the handling of cases when you have an inexperienced lawyers trying cases,” a source said.