The Manhattan District Attorney’s office has moved successfully to dismiss 188 misdemeanor convictions tied to the work of eight discredited New York Police Department officers.
The convictions in question date all the way back to 2001, but District Attorney Alvin Bragg said in a statement that his office was no longer confident in them.
“New Yorkers must know that everyone is acting with the utmost integrity in the pursuit of equal justice under the law,” Mr Bragg said in the statement. “We cannot allow unconstitutional convictions to continue to hinder the lives of New Yorkers.”
The convictions, which disproportionately impacted young Black men, were uniformly dismissed in a short hearing in Manhattan Criminal Court on Thursday morning.
The dismissal of the convictions was a long time in the making. Last year, a group of public defenders and advocacy groups wrote letters to borough district attornies in the city identifying 20 different police officers who had been convicted of crimes and two who had engaged in misconduct. The crimes the officers committed ranged perjury to engaging in unlawful searches to selling controlled substances.
In Manhattan alone, the prosecutor’s office is reviewing some 1,100 convictions that have now been thrown into doubt. The Brooklyn prosecutor’s office earlier this year said it was seeking to vacate 378 convictions, while the Queens district attorney last year attempted to throw out 60 convictions and the Bronx district attorney 250 convictions that relied on a single discredited officer’s testimony.
Advocacy groups and prosecutors may continue to review convictions tied to the work or testimony of discredited officers may continue in the coming weeks and months.
No one convicted in the 188 cases vacated today in Manhattan is currently incarcerated, though a share of those convicted were at one time. A substantial number of the convictions in question were due to possession of marijuana or traffic violations, with young men and young Black men in particular most targeted. The NYPD has a long, documented history of corruption and racism in its ranks.
According to reporting from The New York Times, a number of people who had their convictions vacated on Thursday might not know it. A Harlem neighborhood organisation said that it had only successfully reached one of the seven people it had attempted to contact regarding the dismissals.
As Mr Bragg noted in his statement, the news could be life-changing for people as they attempt to find jobs or housing or access educational opportunities without the weight of a prior criminal conviction.
