Kenneth Thompson's unfulfilled promise
On Monday, the New York Times’ Alan Feuer wrote an interesting article on the groundswell of criminal justice activists who are leading a battle cry against Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson.
Thompson was elected in 2013, promising to reform the borough’s criminal justice system and emphasize public integrity cases in the wake of a spate of wrongful conviction cases that dogged his predecessor, Charles Hynes. As Feuer notes, Thompson satisfied those commitments by refusing to prosecute low-level marijuana offenses, setting up a public integrity hotline and establishing a wrongful conviction unit, among other reform measures.
As such, Feuer’s story piqued my interest and raised several questions – how could the tide turn so quickly against a district attorney who had begun to fulfill many of the promises he campaigned on? Why was he not being afforded the same leash as Hynes, who held the D.A. post for 23 years? And will Thompson’s rare triumph over an incumbent D.A. in 2013 be followed by his own ouster four years later?
It seems that the answer to those questions can be traced back to that fateful November night in 2014 when Peter Liang, a rookie NYPD officer, shot Akai Gurley in a dark stairwell in a public housing building in East New York. Thompson managed to convict Liang on second-degree manslaughter, but, perhaps bowing to pressure from the city’s Chinese-American community, recommended that Liang not serve any prison time for the offense. Liang was eventually sentenced to five years’ probation.
Thompson’s calculation in the Gurley case was puzzling, but also somewhat unsurprising. The killing of Eric Garner in Staten Island by a Staten Island police officer – captured on video for all to see, but with no resulting indictment for the officer – was a classic example of the natural tension that arises when district attorneys are faced with prosecuting law enforcement officers they have to work with to build a case. While Thompson clearly had enough evidence to indict and convict Liang, a harsh sentence – the maximum he would have to serve is 15 years in prison – may have sowed resentment among NYPD officers and detectives that Thompson would have to work with.
Of course, prosecutors are not supposed to let those considerations affect their decisions, and the perception that Thompson caved to law enforcement interests and the outcry from the city’s Chinese-American community has undoubtedly contributed to protesters haranguing Thompson at public events and at his home in Brooklyn.
There’s a sense among these activists that Thompson’s promises of criminal justice reform don’t neatly dovetail with his actions. The conviction of Marcell Dockery on felony murder charges for setting a mattress ablaze in a high-rise building, which led to the death of a police officer, serves as a perfect illustration of this dichotomy.
On the one hand, Thompson was hailed for establishing a Young Adult Court to handle misdemeanor cases for defendants ages 16 to 24, for, in his words, “diverting young people away from the criminal-justice system.” But when it comes to sentencing, will Thompson make the same argument on Dockery’s behalf as he did for Liang? That he is not seeking “revenge” on behalf of the Police Department for the death of one of their own, and that the prosecution’s acknowledgment that Dockery’s actions were accidental should be taken into consideration?
In his article, Feuer compares Thompson’s predicament to that of former Cook County, Illinois, District Attorney Anita Alvarez and Cleveland prosecutor Tim McGinty, both of whom were ousted from office for their handling of the Laquan McDonald case and the death of Tamir Rice, respectively. Those cases, as well as the Garner case and a slew of national police killing headlines, have changed how district attorneys are scrutinized. Prosecutors are no longer given the benefit of the doubt that their actions cannot be compromised by potential conflicts of interest.
In a January 2015 New Yorker profile, Thompson described his philosophy as a prosecutor: “I think that the main duty of the D.A. is to do justice. That means to protect public safety, but it also means that we have to ensure that our criminal-justice system is based on fundamental fairness.”
With “fundamental fairness” central to the grievances regarding his early tenure as district attorney, it will be interesting to see whether Thompson can weather this storm and win re-election in 2017. Without the support of criminal justice activists and the legal community, that might prove difficult.