The cases were thrown out in scores. In the Bronx, 349 convictions were tossed, along with more than 100 in Manhattan. In Brooklyn, 90 were overturned.
After Joseph Franco was charged in 2019 with perjury and other crimes related to his decades as a New York Police Department narcotics detective, prosecutors lined up to dismiss cases in which he had been involved.
But on Tuesday, one more prosecution was tossed: that of Mr. Franco himself. A New York State judge, Robert M. Mandelbaum, found that prosecutors with the Manhattan district attorney’s office had failed to turn over evidence to the detective’s lawyers on three occasions, a major ethical violation, and dismissed the charges.
“As you have heard,” Justice Mandelbaum told jurors, “to date there have been two different occasions that you have heard about where the prosecution failed to disclose certain evidence.”
“It now turns out that the prosecution failed to disclose additional evidence only learned about today,” he added.
The prosecutor handling the case, Stephanie Minogue, was immediately removed as deputy chief of the Police Accountability Unit, which reports directly to the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg.
Mr. Franco’s trial was meant to shine a spotlight on police misconduct at a time when prosecutors were concerned with showing that they could hold their law enforcement partners to account. Instead, the two-week trial will be remembered as a highly public case of wrongdoing by prosecutors, one that all but ensures that the former detective will not face another jury. It leaves the question of his guilt in limbo and raises questions about the swift dismissal of the hundreds of cases in which he was involved.
“It is ironic, but in a really bad way, for the legitimacy of the criminal system in New York that prosecutors, even going after police misconduct, themselves commit misconduct,” said Cynthia Godsoe, a professor at Brooklyn Law School who has pushed for more prosecutorial accountability. “A lot of lawyers are quick to blame police, but are less interested in exposing prosecutors to the oversight they clearly need.”
The dismissal of the charge dealt a major blow to Mr. Bragg, who has made police accountability a focal issue. Though Mr. Franco was charged by the district attorney’s predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., his trial was the most significant proceeding against a police officer that Mr. Bragg had overseen.
The case was dismissed with prejudice: The office will not be able to prosecute Mr. Franco for the same crimes again.
Mr. Franco, 50, was not charged in any borough other than Manhattan, and Brooklyn prosecutors in 2021 said that they had not uncovered additional misconduct. Other prosecutors who have moved to vacate cases related to Mr. Franco’s work are unlikely to bring charges. The statute of limitations for the felony charges that the former detective faced is five years. Mr. Franco stopped working in Brooklyn in 2011, and in the Bronx in 2015.
A lawyer for Mr. Franco, Howard Tanner, said in a statement that his client was relieved, but asked, “How does he get his reputation back?”
“A decorated police officer who honorably served this city for 20 years, he never did anything wrong,” Mr. Tanner said, calling the case “baseless.” He added that prosecutors had repeatedly withheld and destroyed evidence and misrepresented facts.
Some of the withheld evidence included surveillance videos, communications between prosecutors, memos from investigators as well as cellphones from people arrested after Mr. Franco identified them as drug dealers, Mr. Tanner said in an interview.
There were also hundreds of audio files of a prosecution witness whose phone conversations were recorded while she was at the Rikers Island jail complex, Mr. Tanner said.
He said that he could not yet determine whether any of the evidence could have helped exonerate his client.
“The irony isn’t lost on me that this is the public corruption bureau and they conducted themselves in this manner,” Mr. Tanner said.
In a statement, a spokesman for the district attorney’s office, Doug Cohen, announced Ms. Minogue’s removal, saying, “New Yorkers must know that law enforcement, including prosecutors, are acting with the utmost integrity. We hold ourselves accountable to that standard.”
Paul DiGiacomo, the president of the Detectives’ Endowment Association, which represents 18,000 active and retired city detectives, said in a statement that the prosecutors who failed to turn over evidence should be fired.
He said that Mr. Bragg and the unit were “quick to impugn the integrity of our detectives even for possible mere mistakes made in the good faith performance of our duties.”
The case showed the need for an independent review of the prosecutors’ office and a re-evaluation of “their investigative process and ethics,” Mr. DiGiacomo said.
The case was immediately sealed. Mr. Cohen said that the district attorney’s office’s Post-Conviction Justice Unit, which reviews wrongful convictions, would continue to scrutinize cases in which Mr. Franco was involved. Patrice O’Shaughnessy, communications director for the Bronx district attorney, said that office would “evaluate the best course of action with the cases that are still under review.”
Mr. Cohen said that the Manhattan office would analyze what had gone wrong in the case against Mr. Franco. He did not immediately say whether that would involve a review of other cases in which Ms. Minogue was involved, such as the convictions in March of two officers who stole money during a periodic “integrity test” that the Police Department conducts. She remains employed by the office.
The Police Accountability Unit is assigned to prosecute misconduct by law enforcement officers in Manhattan, “including use of excessive force, illegal stops, searches and arrests; and the theft of personal property.” It was previously known as the Public Corruption Unit, and in 2019 it began handing over evidence in the case against Mr. Franco, who was charged with 16 counts, including perjury and official misconduct.
The charges came amid growing skepticism about the work of the police in the city. By 2019, Brooklyn prosecutors had asked for the reversal of eight guilty verdicts reached with the help of a police detective, Louis Scarcella, whose investigations had come under scrutiny. That year at the recommendation of a judge, the Police Department fired Daniel Pantaleo, an officer who had placed a Black man named Eric Garner in a chokehold that led to his death.
When Mr. Franco was charged, he appeared to be part of a pattern of misconduct.
In prosecutors’ openings on Jan. 19, they described Mr. Franco as a deceitful detective who had betrayed the narcotics unit and the city’s trust by lying about witnessing drug deals. Mr. Franco’s job was to observe hand-to-hand exchanges then report them to his unit, providing probable cause to arrest dealers and buyers.
But a prosecutor raised doubts about Mr. Franco’s reports after reviewing video surveillance around public housing developments that showed the detective was never where he said he was. Mr. Franco was accused of lying in cases that led to the arrests of five people, two of whom spent more than a year in jail following their convictions.
The dismissal of cases that he worked on came soon afterward. “We couldn’t responsibly rely on his testimony to stand by these convictions,” said the Brooklyn district attorney, Eric Gonzalez, as his office moved to have them dismissed.
Mr. Tanner told the jury during openings that Mr. Franco’s job was to be a “ghost” in the unit, which meant he had to witness drug deals out of perpetrators’ sight. The detective was working in an “imprecise” system that did not allow him to take notes in real time, Mr. Tanner said, insisting that at worst, Mr. Franco made a mistake about where he saw drugs being sold.
He was on trial, Mr. Tanner said, for doing his job.
A juror on the case, who asked to speak anonymously because she planned to become a lawyer and did not want the case to affect her career, said that she and her peers had been dismissed in less than five minutes on Tuesday.
The juror said that problems with evidence had come to light on Thursday, and that Mr. Tanner had asked for extra time to examine the new material. Shortly thereafter, jurors were told that a witness, Tameeka Baker, who was arrested by Mr. Franco in 2017, was no longer a part of the case and that charges related to her arrest were being dropped.
On Tuesday, jurors were brought into the courtroom where they saw Mr. Franco, red-faced and crying at the defense table. He hugged Mr. Tanner.
Ms. Minogue was not in the courtroom.
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