Prosecutor seeks to free 1993 shooter
A prosecutor for soft-on-crime Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is trying to help spring a murderer from prison he helped send away a decade ago — a move critics say is only possible in the Big Apple’s woke “Bizarro World.”
David Drucker wrote to Gov. Hochul’s Executive Clemency Bureau seeking leniency for rapper Trevell “G. Dep” Coleman, who is serving 15 years to life at Fishkill Correctional Facility for the 1993 cold-blooded shooting death of John Henkel, 32.
“Many defendants display remorse, but it is rarely clear how much they are sorry for their crime and how much they are sorry for getting caught,” wrote Drucker in the Aug. 3 missive.
“With Mr. Coleman there is no doubt — his remorse is as genuine as any I, or others I have talked to, have ever seen.”
“A decision to release Mr. Coleman now would be a very safe as well as humane decision,” added Drucker. “On behalf of the New York County District Attorney’s Office, I strongly urge you to do just that.”
Leave him to ‘rot’
Robert Henkel, the victim’s brother, called Drucker’s clemency push a “farce” and is demanding Hochul reject it.
“This is such a conflict of interest,” Henkel fumed. “The same guy who put him away is now asking for him to get out. It is one thing to seek [clemency] for drug crimes — but not murder.
“Let him rot in jail! Let him do his 15 years and then he can try to get out on parole.”
Coleman isn’t parole-eligible until 2025.
In 2012, Drucker was working for then-Manhattan DA Cy Vance when he led a team that helped convict Coleman on second-degree murder charges. Drucker retired in September 2021 but returned to the office two months later as a $100-an-hour part-time prosecutor.
The killing would have remained a cold case had Coleman in 2010 not walked into the 25th Precinct stationhouse in Harlem and confessed to the Oct. 19, 1993, murder of John Henkel.
Coleman was an up-and-coming rap star who signed with Sean “Diddy” Combs’ Bad Boy label in 1999. He had also racked up more than 25 arrests for drugs, burglary and grand larceny.
He told cops he was riding a bike when he rolled up on Henkel at Park Avenue and East 114th Street to announce a robbery. When Henkel resisted, Colemen said he pulled out a .40-caliber gun and shot him three times in the chest.
Coleman said he confessed because the secret “weighed on me.”
At sentencing, Drucker said the outcome was fair.
There was “a totally innocent victim,” Drucker said at the time. “The defendant shot him three times in the torso, killing him, and then he biked off leaving the victim to die.”
Brooklyn Councilman Ari Kagan — a longtime Democrat who said he switched to the GOP this past week in part because of softon-crime tactics pushed by lefty politicians like Bragg — called the DA Office’s “behavior” in this case “reprehensible.”
‘Lack of judgment’
“It shows a lack of judgment and complete ignorance of taxpayers’ interest,” he said.
Drucker hauled in a $186,877 lump-sum payout by retiring last year and cashing out unused leave accrued over four decades in the DA’s Office. He also earned another $76,690 in salary in the fiscal year that ended June 30.
“Only in the Bizzaro World do you see an ADA ‘resign’ to take a payout, be rehired and then work on freeing a convicted killer he helped put behind bars,” Councilman Robert Holden (D-Queens) barked.
“Not a day goes by without an ethics violation or a case of prosecutorial negligence by the Manhattan DA’s Office. But this is what we’ve come to expect with DA Alvin Bragg.”
Hochul spokeswoman Hazel Crampton-Hays said the governor doesn’t comment on pending clemency applications.
Bragg spokeswoman Emily Tuttle called Drucker a “universally respected career prosecutor who has served with distinction.”
She added, “When an esteemed homicide prosecutor such as Mr. Drucker believes that a New Yorker deserves early release, we listen.”