Bronx safeafe – for criminals inals

DA is Number 1 – for dropped cases

The cops cuff ’em, and the Bronx DA sets ’ em free.

Prosecutors working under District Attorney Robert Johnson routinely decline to pursue cases — at a rate twice as high as the rest of the city, newly released data show.

An internal policy in Johnson’s office dictates that cases should be dropped if a victim doesn’t give a statement within 24 hours, leaving 23.4 percent of all cases unprosecuted last year, lawenforcement officials said.

No other district attorney employs such a policy.

By contrast, district attorneys citywide declined to prosecute just 10.5 percent of cases last year — and the rate was just 12.1 percent on Staten Island, the second highest, and 4.8 percent in Manhattan, the lowest, according to data from the state Division of Criminal Justice Services.

“First you have to understand we have to balance protection of citizens against prosecuting people without sufficient evidence. It’s a balancing act,” said Johnson’s spokesman, Steven Reed.

“If someone has been arrested and deprived of liberty, it’s our obligation to determine as soon as possible what evidence we have.”

The high rate of dropped cases, which has been consistently higher than the rest of the city since the seemingly softoncrime DA took office in 1989, was first reported by WNYC.

Academics and victimsrights advocates questioned how the Bronx numbers could be so out of whack with the rest of the city.

“It defies common sense that someone who has just been sexually assaulted or robbed can necessarily get it together to come down to the DA’s Office and give a full statement and be in the emotional state of mind to say everything they need to say,” said Mai Fernandez, a former Manhattan prosecutor and executive director of the National Center for Victims of Crime.

Likewise, Ramatua Begura, a program director with the Bronxbased Sauti Yetu Center for African Women, says the policy has a chilling effect on sexualassault victims.

“It takes advocates like ourselves days and weeks to understand they have rights and they will be protected,” she said. “Then if the case is dropped, it affirms to the community that maybe they are not telling the truth. It says to people she was lying all along, and then other victims won’t come forward.”

Indeed, during a threemonth period in 2012, half of the cases the Bronx DA declined to pursue were dropped because the victim didn’t cooperate within a day.

“This creates an urgency that shouldn’t exist,” said Eugene O’Donnell, an excop and prosecutor who teaches at John Jay College.

“I had one case where it was a domesticviolence case where the defendant was accused of choking his girlfriend until she lost consciousness,” said one veteran Bronx defense attorney.

“Because the girlfriend was now a reluctant complainant and told the prosecutor that she wasn’t going to cooperate, the DA’s Office dismissed the charges at arraignment. The judge was very unhappy and gave a tonguelashing to the [assistant district attorney] and [said] they failed the victim.”

Additional reporting by Kirstan Conley