Brooklyn's newly-elected District Attorney
has asked outgoing DA Charles Hynes to cease work on the prosecution of the ultra-Orthodox cantor who was previously convicted of eight counts of molestation. According to the Jewish Week, Ken Thompson is intervening because Hynes was expected to offer a lenient plea bargain to Rabbi Baruch Lebovits, who was sentenced to 10 ½ to 32 years in prison in 2010 for raping children in Borough Park before his conviction was reversed on a series of technicalities.
In his letter to Hynes that was also copied to the judge and attorneys involved in the case, Thompson writes that it's “important that I have a full opportunity to review the Lebovits matter and participate in the decision to take the case to trial or dispose of it by way of a guilty plea.”
Hynes' spokesman Jerry Schmetterer told the Daily News, "We're going to comply with that request."
Hynes' gesture of comity comes two weeks after he fired a longtime prosecutor for suggesting that his office hadn't properly handled a wrongful conviction case, and demoted two other veteran prosecutors in charge of the dubious extortion case against Sam Kellner, the man who helped convict Lebovits by bringing his alleged victims to the police and in the process, angered powerful forces in the Orthodox community.
The two demoted attorneys had told Kellner they would drop his case. Hynes then vowed he would continue it. Last week, prosecutors pushed back hearings in the case until January, when Hynes will no longer be in office.
Don't confuse these judicial mishaps with Hynes' investigation of roughly 50 cases in which his office may have utilized the faulty and illegal police work of an outspoken former NYPD detective to convict innocent people.
