ULSTER COUNTY DA STEPPING DOWN
District Attorney Holley Carnright looks back on a 40-year law career, during which he has served as both a criminal prosecutor and as a public defender.
As Ulster County district attorney, Holley Carnright has been responsible for the prosecution of all the crimes — large and small — that occurred in Ulster County over the past 12 years.
And in many of the most difficult and heinous cases, it was Carnright who appeared in court to personally handle the prosecutions.
On Tuesday, Carnright will close the book on a career that he began as a fresh-out-of-college lawyer working as an assistant district attorney under then-District Attorney Michael
Kavanagh, and ended with him leading the office where he began his career 40 years earlier.
“It’s time to step back,” Carnright said during a recent interview. “It’s time to do some
thing besides murder and mayhem.
“And it’s time for Denise (Carnright’s wife of 38 years) to do that,” he added. “I could never be here without her support, and there comes a time when what’s fair is fair.
“It’s hard,” he said. “But it’s time.”
Carnright said he never really envisioned life as a trial lawyer. But his father, an attorney with a private practice in Saugerties, apparently saw something in his son that his son did not.
As Carnright recalls, he was finishing up his bachelor’s degree, living on Cape Cod and working as a handyman when he got a phone call from his father.
Carnright said his father asked what he was doing, and suggested the younger Carnright go to Boston the next day and take his law board exam. Carnright remembers telling his father that he didn’t really want to be a lawyer — “I was in heaven living in Cape Cod; I wasn’t ready to leave this idyllic situation” — but when his father asked “What else do you have to do?” he couldn’t argue otherwise.
Carnright was accepted into law school and his father convinced him to go, even offering to cover the cost, asking his son again, “Honestly, what else do you have to do?”
“Well,” Carnright said, “who turns down a chance to go to Boston and have your law school paid for?”
So he went.
And it was love from the start.
“I loved it. I just loved the study of law, I loved being in Boston,” he recalled. “I was in love (it was where he met his future bride), and I was in Boston and I was studying law and I just loved it.”
Carnright said he expected to go into practice with his father, “and that was fine with me,” but apparently fate had other plans for the budding attorney.
Fresh out of law school, Carnright got a call from Kavanagh asking him to come to the District Attorney’s Office for an interview, and he was offered a job as an assistant district attorney. Carnright rose to the position of chief assistant district attorney before leaving the office in 1982 to work with his father in private practice. However, the lure of practicing criminal law again began to tug at him, and when he was offered a job in the Ulster County Public Defender’s Office, he took it.
He remained as an assistant public defender for 20 years, until once again, fate intervened.
In 2007, Carnright returned home after a family holiday in Florida to the news that then-District Attorney Donald Williams would not seek re-election, and his phone ringing off the hook from people urging him to run for the office.
“Why would I do that?” he remembered thinking. “I had a successful practice working with my dad and I was working in the Public Defender’s Office.”
But former Republican Committee Chairman Mario
Catalano convinced Carnright to give it a shot, and in November 2007, Carnright emerged the victor in a three-way race for the seat. He was re-elected in 2011 and again in 2015.
It was a decision he said he has never regretted.
“The stuff we do makes a difference,” Carnright said. “Who else goes to work in the morning and has that kind of opportunity?
“I can’t tell you how much of a reward it is. I get up in the morning, I’m driving down the Thruway and I can’t wait to come to work,” he said. “I feel honored and blessed to be able to do this.”
Carnright prides himself on fostering an atmosphere of cooperation between law enforcement agencies that he said ended “turf” fights over crime scenes. He said too, that under his leadership, the office has made strides mining the Internet for data that can be used in the prosecution of crimes. The office also now has a special “crimes against revenue” unit and assistant district attorneys who specialize in the prosecution of sex crimes, crimes against children and crimes involving domestic violence.
But it hasn’t always been easy. Ulster County has had more than its fair share of gruesome, if not outright bizarre cases. And Carnright has been in the courtroom personally prosecuting many of the worst of those crimes.
It was Carnright who prosecuted the first gangland execution case in the county, securing murder convictions against two gang members and conspiracy to commit murder convictions against three others. The county saw the largest drug sweep in the region under Carnright and the biggest welfare fraud prosecution.
He successfully prosecuted Anthony Passaro of Saugerties, who shot his wife to death in front of the couple’s young children in 2007. He won the 2010 conviction of Daniel Malak in the 1996 murder of 15-yearold Joseph Martin.
And he successfully prosecuted Kenneth Stahli for the 2014 beating death of two-year-old Mason DeCosmo, the son of Kaitlin Wolfert, Stahli’s girlfriend at the time.
“I could give a summation on half of these cases right now,” he said. “I see the pictures in my mind and they’re never going to go away.”
“We’ve had a lot of very very fascinatingly interesting cases if you can divorce yourself from the emotions,” Carnright said. “Some of those are things you look back on, but some of them are just scars.”
The Stahli case, Carnright said, is one of those that has left a scar.
“That was a tough one,” he said. “I haven’t been back. I haven’t tried a case since then.”
Carnright said he doesn’t have a lot of plans for retirement, although he admits he’s “kind of handy with a chainsaw and a hammer” and his wife is busy drawing up a list of projects for him to take on.
And then, of course there are the grandkids who live in Pennslyvania.
And more long walks in the woods with his trusty old rescue dog.