Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes in hot seat for protecting prosecutor who imprisoned innocent man
Former suspect Jabbar Collins is seeking $150 million for the 15 years he spent in prison
By John Marzulli / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS, Friday, November 16, 2012
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A federal judge slammed
Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes Friday for protecting a rogue prosecutor accused of railroading an innocent man on murder charges.
The freed man,
Jabbar Collins,
is seeking $150 million for the 15 years he spent in prison for
murdering a rabbi. Hynes' top aide Michael Vecchione - who prosecuted
the case back in 1995 - is accused of threatening a witness and
withholding evidence for more than a decade that could have exonerated
the man .
Judge Frederic Block said he was "disturbed" and
"puzzled" that Hynes did not punish Vecchione, but instead heaped praise
on him despite the serious allegations.
"Hynes hasn't treated it seriously, has he?" Block asked a city
lawyer at pre-trial hearing. "What has he done? Name one thing he's done in light of Vecchione's aberrational behavior.
"This
was horrific behavior on the part of Vecchione," Block said. "We are
going to have a civil proceeding and all of this is going to be
uncovered, I kid you not."
The judge peppered city lawyer Arthur Larkin about Hynes' public statements on the case.
A
key witness who had incriminated Collins in the 1995 murder of Rabbi
Abraham Pollack in Brooklyn testified at a hearing last year that
Vecchione threatened to clobber him over the head with a
coffee table and throw him in jail if he did not finger Collins for the killing.
Vecchione is the chief of the district attorney's rackets bureau and is considered one of Hynes' closest aides.
Collins'
conviction was tossed out last year by another federal judge in
Brooklyn, Dora Irizarry, who termed the prosecutors' conduct "shameful"
and called the years of incarceration a "tragedy," according to the
suit.
Hynes decided not to retry him for the murder, but his office
has not wavered in the belief that Collins killed the rabbi as he was
collecting rent at a building he owned.
The suit notes that
despite Irizarry's harsh comments, Hynes publicly praised Vecchione in a
press release as a "very principled lawyer" who had done nothing wrong
and would not face disciplinary action.
Pressed about Hynes public statements of support for Vecchione, Larkin, the city lawyer, responded, "I can't speak to that."
Collins' lawyer Joel Rudin said he would discuss the possibility of a settlement with the city.
"I would very much like the facts to come out, but my client also wants to get on with his life," Rudin said outside court.
Block
criticized Hynes for exposing the city to significant liability by
publicly defending Vecchione instead of disciplining him. He set a trial
date of April 8 for a lawsuit.
A spokesman for Hynes declined to respond to the judge's comments.
Hynes
is facing a potentially tough re-election fight next year from at least
two announced opponents, including former Brooklyn federal prosecutor
Kenneth Thompson.
Top Prosecutor in Brooklyn Is Rebuked by U.S. Judge
NYTimes, Published: November 16, 2012
A
federal judge chastised the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J.
Hynes, on Friday for defending and promoting a prosecutor in his office
whose illegal tactics sent an innocent man to prison for 15 years.
Judge
Frederic Block made the comments during pretrial proceedings over a
lawsuit filed by Jabbar Collins, who was exonerated of murder charges in
June 2010 after a judge found that Mr. Hynes’s office relied on false
testimony, coerced witnesses and suppressed evidence in the case. One
prosecutor, Michael Vecchione, was found to be the driving force behind
the case.
Mr. Collins, who had been convicted of the 1995 murder
of Rabbi Abraham Pollack, is seeking to hold Mr. Vecchione and several
other prosecutors personally liable along with the city. He is seeking
$150 million in damages.
“I’m disturbed that Hynes praises
Vecchione after what happened,” Judge Block said Friday in Federal
District Court in Brooklyn. “Hynes hasn’t treated this seriously, has
he?” the judge asked a lawyer for the city. “Name one thing that he has
done in light of Mr. Vecchione’s aberration,” the judge continued.
A
lawyer for Mr. Collins, Joel Rudin, said he planned to take sworn
depositions of Mr. Hynes and Mr. Vecchione. The judge set a trial date
of April 8.
Jerry Schmetterer, the director of public
information for the Kings County district attorney’s office, said Mr.
Hynes declined to comment because the judge’s statements were related to
“ongoing litigation.”
A Solitary Jailhouse Lawyer Argues His Way Out of Prison
By SEAN GARDINER, Wall Street Journal, December 24, 2010
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Each
morning for 5,546 days, Jabbar Collins knew exactly what he'd wear when
he awoke: a dark-green shirt with matching dark-green pants.
The
prison greenies of a convicted murderer, he says, were "overly starched
in the beginning, but as time wore on, and after repeated washes, they
were worn and dull, like so many other things on the inside."
Today,
Jabbar Collins works as a paralegal at the Law Offices of Joel B. Rudin
in Manhattan. But for 15 years, he sat in prison, convicted of the 1994
murder of Rabbi Abraham Pollack. Mr. Collins, who maintained his
innocence, spent much of those 15 years in a computerless prison law
library.
..
For most of those 15 years, Mr. Collins, who
maintained his innocence, knew the only way his wardrobe would change
was if he did something that's indescribably rare. He'd have to lawyer
himself out of jail.
There was no crusading journalist, no
nonprofit group taking up his cause, just Inmate 95A2646, a high-school
dropout from Brooklyn, alone in a computerless prison law library.
"'Needle
in a haystack' doesn't communicate it exactly. Is it more like
lightning striking your house?" says Adele Bernard, who runs the
Post-Conviction Project at Pace Law School in New York, which
investigates claims of wrongful conviction. "It's so unbelievably
hard…that it's almost impossible to come up with something that captures
that."
Mr. Collins pried documents from wary prosecutors,
tracked down reluctant witnesses and persuaded them, at least once
through trickery, to reveal what allegedly went on before and at the
trial where he was convicted of the high-profile 1994 murder of Rabbi
Abraham Pollack.
The improbable result of that decade-and-a-half
struggle was evident on a recent morning in a Midtown Manhattan
skyscraper. Mr. Collins sat in a small office he now shares, wearing one
of the eight dark suits he owns, a white shirt with French cuffs, a
blue-and-gray striped tie and a pair of expensive wingtips. "Every day
is beautiful" now, he said, smiling. "I don't have a bad day anymore. I
think that my worst bad day out of prison will be better than my
greatest good day in prison."
After more than 15 years behind
bars and now free after getting his murder conviction overturned, Jabbar
Collins starts his day like so many other New Yorkers: He takes the
subway to his job in Manhattan. WSJ's Jason Bellini reports.
.
On
March 13, 1995, as Mr. Collins was led by officers through a side door
of a Brooklyn courtroom to a holding cell, his mother let loose a
wailing sound that he'd "never heard before or since." Her son had just
been convicted of murder.
He was 22, a father of three and facing
at least 34 2/3 years behind bars. Three witnesses had implicated him
in the midday shooting of Mr. Pollack as the rabbi collected rent in a
building at 126 Graham Avenue in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.
Mr. Collins said he was home getting a haircut at the time.
To
that point in his life, Mr. Collins had been drifting. His father died
when he was 12 and his mother worked two jobs while also studying
nursing. Under-supervised, he skipped school often, smoked a lot of pot
and fathered the first of his children when he was 15.
When he
was 16, he was arrested for a robbery. He says he was just waiting
outside the store where a robbery took place. Mr. Collins accepted a
youthful-offender adjudication under which he got probation and the
arrest could eventually be purged.
Mr. Collins later obtained a
general-equivalency diploma and took some classes at Long Island
University. He was trying to transfer to John Jay College of Criminal
Justice when he was arrested for Mr. Pollack's murder.
During his
trial, Mr. Collins recalls being mystified. "I felt like a child," he
says, "everyone talking over my head." But hearing his mother wailing as
he was taken away suddenly cleared his head. "You have a life of misery
ahead of you," he remembers telling himself. "The only way you're going
to get out is to become your own lawyer."
On returning to Rikers
Island, the city jail complex, Mr. Collins headed to the law library.
There and later at Green Haven prison north of the city, he spent most
of his free time in law libraries, pouring himself into legal books:
"Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure," "McKinney's Consolidated Laws of
New York," "The Legal Research Manual."
A thick text for
paralegals called "Case Analysis and Fundamentals of Legal Writing"
became his bible. He devoted two months to mastering the intricacies of
federal and state law on access to public records.
His first
request for trial records under New York's Freedom of Information Law,
in July 1995, was denied. He would go on to file six more requests, five
more appeals and a lawsuit before a judge gave him some of the records
over two years later.
Finally succeeding in a request, gaining
239 pages of documents and 94 audio tapes, emboldened him. "It kind of
refilled the tanks," he says, "gave me the confidence to fight on."
Over
time, Mr. Collins would file a dizzying number of records requests. If
they were denied, he appealed. If he lost, he'd add his requests to
those he prepared for other inmates.
"The mosaic of intelligence
gathering," Mr. Collins calls this. "You collect one item at a time and
you add to the picture piece by piece until you create what is a
stunning mosaic of what really happened."
He picked away at his
case for eight years, but by the fall of 2003 he had hit a wall. That's
when he carried out a ruse to trick Adrian Diaz, who had testified to
seeing Mr. Collins tuck a gun in his waistband after the murder, into
talking to him.
"I became Kevin Beekman, district attorney's
investigator, for about 25 minutes," Mr. Collins says. The fictitious
Mr. Beekman said he needed to recreate documents lost in the Sept. 11,
2001, World Trade Center attack. When Mr. Diaz agreed to talk about his
testimony, Mr. Collins routed the call through a phone in his mother's
home so it could be recorded.
Mr. Diaz said that before the
trial, he had gone to Puerto Rico, in violation of his probation for
marijuana possession. He agreed to return and testify against Mr.
Collins, he said, only after prosecutors promised they would make sure
his probation wasn't revoked.
That account, which Mr. Diaz later
attested to in a signed affidavit, wasn't provided by prosecutors to
Mr. Collins's defense counsel, who could have used it to undermine the
witness by showing he was given an incentive to testify.
In 2005
Mr. Collins wrote to another witness, Edwin Oliva, who had testified
that before the murder, Mr. Collins said he was going to rob the rabbi.
"I really need to know what happened between you and the District
Attorney's Office," Mr. Collins wrote.
"I always knew I was
going to hear from you sooner or later," Mr. Oliva wrote back. "And to
tell you the truth, I am glad you wrote, now once and for all I can
settle the record."
Mr. Oliva wrote that he had been arrested a
few weeks after the Pollack murder for a robbery he pulled in the
building. He said the police asked about the rabbi's killing and he told
them all he knew was that Mr. Collins had been arrested.
Detectives
threatened to charge Mr. Oliva as an accessory, he wrote, and then made
up a statement implicating Mr. Collins. Mr. Oliva wrote that he was so
strung out and sleepy from a month-long run of "smoking & sniffin'
dope" that he signed the statement, adding he "didn't even know what...I
was signing."
But now, Mr. Oliva added, he wanted to help Mr. Collins, "because I know you got a rotten deal."
Mr.
Oliva granted access to his records. They included a Legal Aid document
that referenced, without elaborating, a "deal" being discussed between
the judge, a prosecutor and Mr. Oliva's attorney. Mr. Oliva was allowed
to plead to a lesser felony than he had been indicted for. He received a
sentence of up to three years. The other charge could have kept him in
prison longer.
At the trial, lead prosecutor Michael Vecchione
stated that no key witnesses had received anything for testifying.
"Oliva's motive is simple," the prosecutor said. "Just like all the rest
of the witnesses, he saw something, he heard something, someone asked
him about it, and he is telling what he saw and he is telling what he
heard. Nothing else." Mr. Vecchione declined requests for comment.
Mr.
Collins, though a skilled jailhouse lawyer who helped many other
inmates, could take his own appeal only so far without help. In late
2005, after 10 years working alone, he contacted Joel Rudin, a
civil-rights attorney known for winning what was then the largest
wrongful-conviction settlement in New York, $5 million.
"I was amazed" at Mr. Collins's file, Mr. Rudin says. "I've never seen anything like this. There was so much documentation."
As
the lawyer
began reworking the appeal, Mr. Collins gathered another piece of his
mosaic. He obtained a tape of calls to 911 after the killing.
A
witness had testified he called 911 and told of seeing Mr. Collins run
past. But when Mr. Collins listened to the tape of 911 calls, none of
the voices sounded like what he recalled this witness sounding like at
the trial.
Mr. Collins obtained a tape of a prosecution interview
with this witness, Angel Santos. He hired a voice expert to compare the
interview tape with the tape of people calling 911. No matches.
Mr.
Santos and the other two main witnesses, Messrs. Diaz and Oliva,
couldn't be reached for comment. Michael Harrison, Mr. Collins's
court-appointed trial lawyer, said he couldn't remember whether he ever
received the 911 tape because it was so long ago.
In March 2006,
Mr. Rudin asked a state judge to overturn Mr. Collins's murder
conviction on the grounds of newly discovered information the defense
should have been given.
Mr. Vecchione, the prosecutor, swore that
claims authorities had either coerced witnesses or failed to turn over
potentially exculpatory information "are, without exception, untrue."
Then
the roof crashed down. Learning of Mr. Collins's impersonation of an
investigator, state Justice Robert Holdman dismissed the appeal,
declaring it to be "wholly without merit, conclusory, incredible,
unsubstantiated, and, in significant part, to be predicated on a
foundation of fraud." For good measure, he barred Mr. Collins from
filing future requests for information.
"Just devastating," Mr. Collins says. "This had been my life's work for the last 10 years."
He
didn't have the luxury of wallowing. State law allows only 30 days to
appeal such a ruling. As he wrote his appeal, he couldn't keep out his
bitterness, and Mr. Rudin had to redo it. The state appeal failed.
In
what amounted to their last shot, they filed a motion in federal court
in Brooklyn seeking to overturn the conviction based on prosecutors'
"knowing presentation, at trial, of false or misleading testimony" and
withholding of evidence that might have been used to discredit the main
witnesses.
This March, after two years of legal wrangling,
federal Judge Dora Irizarry approved Mr. Rudin's request for additional
material from prosecutors. Information Mr. Collins had spent more than a
decade trying to get his hands on suddenly began pouring in.
One
document concerned Mr. Oliva, the witness who wrote that under police
pressure he signed a statement implicating Mr. Collins in the murder,
even though he knew nothing about it. The document suggested that as the
murder trial neared, Mr. Oliva had balked at cooperating. It said his
work release for a robbery conviction was revoked "after he failed to
cooperate with D.A.'s office regarding a homicide."
Other newly
discovered information suggested Mr. Oliva had briefly recanted his
statement implicating Mr. Collins. A prosecutor preparing to fight Mr.
Collins's appeal learned this from a retired detective, who said that
Mr. Oliva recanted, then changed his mind again and stuck to his
statement after the detective and several prosecutors spoke with him at
the Brooklyn D.A.'s office.
This prosecutor turned that
information over to Judge Irizarry, acknowledging it should have been
provided to Mr. Collins's murder-trial defense. (Mr. Vecchione had
denied at Mr. Collins's state appeal that any witness ever recanted or
"had to be threatened or forced to testify.")
Four days before a
scheduled hearing in Judge Irizarry's federal court, the D.A.'s office
offered to reduce the charge against Mr. Collins to manslaughter,
allowing his immediate release.
Mr. Collins rejected the offer.
Later
the same day, prosecutors informed the court that they wouldn't fight
Mr. Collins's effort to overturn his conviction, but said they planned
to retry him.
A retrial would move the case back to state court, a venue where prosecutors had known nothing but success against Mr. Collins.
Mr.
Rudin, desperate to keep the case in federal court, persuaded Judge
Irizarry to hold a rare hearing on whether the D.A. should be barred
from retrying Mr. Collins because its misconduct had been so pervasive.
The
hearing's first witness was Mr. Santos, the man who had testified about
making a 911 call after the murder, but whose voice didn't seem to
match any of the voices on the 911 tape.
Mr. Santos told the hearing that in the period when the murder occurred, he was using drugs "every day. Twenty-four hours."
He
said that as the murder trial neared a year later, he told Mr.
Vecchione he didn't want to testify, but Mr. Vecchione began "yelling at
me and telling me he was going to hit me over the head with some coffee
table."
He said he was threatened with prosecution, then locked
up for a week as a material witness. When he agreed to testify, he
said, he was taken from jail to a Holiday Inn, which he described as
"paradise."
The federal hearing was due to
resume
a week later with testimony from Mr. Vecchione and other prosecutors.
Instead, the D.A.'s office gave up. It said its decision was "based upon
the weaknesses that now exist with the witnesses," but added that its
"position, then and now, was that we believe in this defendant's guilt."
Judge
Irizarry was not pleased. "It's really sad that the D.A.'s office
persists in standing firm and saying they did nothing wrong here," she
said. "It is, indeed, sad." Judge Irizarry declined to be interviewed;
the judge who turned down Mr. Collins's state appeal didn't return a
call seeking comment,
Brooklyn D.A. Charles Hynes stood firm.
"Michael Vecchione is not guilty of any misconduct," Mr. Hynes said at
the time. He, Mr. Vecchione—who is now chief of the rackets division—and
a spokesman for the D.A.'s office all declined to comment, citing
likely litigation by Mr. Collins.
Mr. Collins walked out of
prison on June 9, to an emotional welcome from his family. He has had
many Rip Van Winkle moments. Swipe cards have replaced tokens on the
subway; coffee shops called Starbucks are everywhere; there are these
devices called iPhones.
But some things haven't changed. Mr. Collins is back in a law library. His attorney, Mr. Rudin, has hired him as a paralegal.
Mr.
Collins is first concentrating on his own case. He has filed "notices
of claim" announcing an intention to sue the city and state for $60
million.
As a
paralegal,
he can't give legal advice to the many inmates who have written seeking
it. He hopes one day to change that, by becoming an attorney.
Write to Sean Gardiner at sean.gardiner@wsj.com
Who Did What
Jabbar
Collins achieved the rare feat of lawyering himself out of prison, 15
years after he was convicted of murdering a rabbi in Brooklyn, N.Y. Here
are some of those involved.
PROSECUTOR:
Michael Vecchione denied any witnesses were rewarded or pressured.
JUDGES:
Robert Holdman rejected appeal at state level.
Dora Irizarry heard federal appeal where conviction was overturned.
WITNESSES:
Adrian
Diaz testified at trial he saw Collins with a gun. When Collins much
later called him, posing as a D.A. investigator, Diaz talked about his
route to becoming a witness.
Edwin Oliva testified at trial that
Collins had said he planned to rob the rabbi. When Collins wrote to
Oliva years later, Oliva wrote back describing what lay behind his
testimony.
Angel Santos testified at trial he had called 911 and
said he saw Collins run past. His voice didn't seem to Collins to match
any voices on the 911 tape.
LAWYER:
Joel Rudin helped Collins after his own 10-year legal effort.
L.A. Unified teachers’ effectiveness also varies ‘substantially,’ says the study, which looked at students’ standardized math test scores.
