Yehia Amin, of New York, smiled and flashed what court observers saw as a “victory sign,” as he was sentenced on Tuesday to 90 days in jail for stalking kippah-wearing Jews through Times Square and punching an Israeli tourist days after Oct. 7.
Amin pleaded guilty in March to third-degree assault as a hate crime under a plea agreement with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. He originally faced seven charges stemming from the Oct. 18, 2023 attack.
Glenn Richter, founder of the New York Jewish Community Judicial Watch Group, told JNS that Amin arrived at court late in the day with his mother after failing to appear in the morning.
“Mr. Amin, who should have been there in the morning, saunters in in the afternoon, along with his mommy,” Richter told JNS. Court staff had to locate an Arabic interpreter, which pushed the case to the end of the day, he said.
During the sentencing, Althea Drysdale, a judge in the New York City Criminal Courts, saw Amin smiling and asked him about it.
“I see you smiling,” the judge told Amin, as Richter recalled. “This is a serious matter. Why are you smiling?”
Amin said, via the interpreter, that he was smiling because he wanted to look good for the photographs, Richter told JNS.
Amin’s demeanor struck Richter as especially jarring given that he was being sentenced to jail. “What kind of guy grins at this very, very, very tough judge Althea Drysdale as she’s sentencing him to prison time?” Richter told JNS.
Richter said that he did not interpret Amin’s hand gesture as a peace sign. “To me, it’s a V for victory,” he said. “It’s possible that he thought, listen, there were originally seven charges that were going to be thrown against him, and it was plea bargained down to one charge of third-degree assault as a hate crime.”
“Maybe to him this was a victory,” Richter told JNS.
Richter, who attended prior hearings in the case, said that Amin hadn’t behaved that way previously.
“I think this is because he was finally being sentenced,” he told JNS.
The smile “could have been a smirk of satisfaction,” he said. “You know, ‘I only got 90 days.’”
Prosecutors said that Amin followed the 23-year-old Israeli and four friends, all of whom were wearing kippahs, for several minutes near Times Square while making antisemitic threats. The latter included “Hamas should kill more of you,” “may Allah kill all the Jews” and “all Jews should die,” prosecutors said.
After the Jewish group tried to get away, Amin ran up behind the Israeli and punched him in the back of the head, according to prosecutors.
Members of Richter’s watch group, who have attended Amin’s court appearances, said that the plea agreement is too lenient.
“This is an example of the imbalance with Bragg’s office,” Serena Smulansky told JNS, of Alvin Bragg, Manhattan district attorney. “This man has appeared 22 times in court with so many excuses. He is completely unrepentant.”
Smulansky said that during an earlier court appearance, Amin behaved threateningly toward her in a courthouse hallway during a break.
“I went to the bathroom and when I returned and had to walk past the defendant, he kind of started toward me and said something like, ‘What are you looking at?’” she told JNS. “His mom and his lawyer told him to stop it and he said, ‘But she was looking at me.’”
Smulansky said that she told the assistant district attorney handling the case that she considered Amin’s conduct to be a threat but received no follow-up.
She compared Amin’s treatment with that of Larry Montes, 46, who is accused of attacking a congregant and security guard and damaging religious objects while disrupting Shabbat services at Central Synagogue, a Reform congregation in Midtown.
“You have a nutcase like Montes, who committed a similar act of violence but is clearly off his head, and he is being held in federal custody, up to 15 years in prison on state charges alone,” Smulansky said.
She told JNS that the disparity reinforced her view that prosecutors “choose certain defendants to make an example out of,” and others are not detained during their cases and ultimately face little or no prison time.
Richter also said that the 90-day sentence was too light. Plea agreements are often a consequence of prosecutors having limited time and resources to take cases to trial, as he sees it.
“It’s a slap in the wrist, because that’s a plea deal,” Richter told JNS. “There’s a plea deal because of limited resources.”
Brian Chenensky, another court-watch participant who attended the sentencing, took a different view.
“I think it’s a miracle that he got sentenced, taking into account the state of the justice system in New York City,” Chenensky told JNS. “He’s going to jail for 90 days.”
“I think it’s more than a slap on the wrist,” he said.
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