Three Brooklyn brothers admitted they tried to bully the boyfriend of a
Hasidic sex abuse victim before an explosive trial but received no jail
time from the judge Thursday.
Although prosecutors insisted they should get at least 30 days in jail
for misdemeanor coercion, Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Danny Chun
allowed the trio to plead guilty and get conditional discharge.
At the time of their arrest the DA said the three Berger brothers could be sent away for up to 4 years for Jacob and for up to 1 year for Joseph and Hertzka. At sentencing the DA asked for much less and allowed some of the felony counts to be dropped and folded in under a misdemeanor charge. An informed source tells me the judge behaved within the usual standards given what the DA handed him.
ReplyDeleteThe DA can blame judges all he wants. But he is in his 24th year in office and no haredi has ever served even a 1-day sentence for bribing, harassing, threatening etc a victim of abuse. Not one day. Surely the DA isn't claiming that every judge in Brooklyn is interfering with his efforts.
https://frumfollies.wordpress.com/2013/06/08/hynes-has-never-sent-a-haredi-to-jail-for-obstructing-the-prosecution-of-sex-abuse/
It is time for you to respect the judicial independence of prosecutors. That is the law of the land and you ought to respect that fact. Clearly all the judges felt no jail time was warranted for the low-level trumped up charges against hareidim. (And there are precious few, thankfully, of even that.)
DeleteWhile I have all the sympathy in the world, I think your comment has abandoned intellectual honesty. Firstly, what occurred is fully consistent with how almost all prosecutors in all districts handle affairs of plea bargains and sentencing. In every form of crime, there is the possibility of pleading down to misdemeanors and sparing the prosecutor and court the expense of a trial. This is less common in Federal Courts, but this situation is quite average.
ReplyDeleteSecondly, and here is where we probably agree more than not, the entire concept of arresting and charging those who tamper with witnesses in abuse cases is novel. To claim that no one has ever spent a day in jail for this crime is unimpressive. Our agreement is that this should have been recognized as a serious interference with the court long ago, and that it should not have been whitewashed until this point. There have been many versions of obstruction that were the rule until just a few years ago. Most of these involved obstruction before anything ever reached the DA, protecting the criminals and limiting safety for our children. I pin much less responsibility on the DA than you do, though the crime should been addressed much better than it is being done, even today.
When the system works in our favor we love it, but when it doesn't then we claim it's corrupt, rigged or fixed. Hopefully Charles Hynes and Henna White will both be out of jobs soon, but this is the best system we have
ReplyDeleteIn this case it worked, other than the fact that these charges shouldn't have been filed in the first place.
Delete$500 is a fair penalty to make a trumped up case (of what amounts to enforcing religious kashrus laws -- something the State is Constitutionally prohibited from involving itself in) go away.
ReplyDeleteBen Torah
ReplyDeleteWhy is this a trumped up case ?
When the hooligans misbehaved in court during the trial by taking pictures of the victim with their phones, the judge likened the young men to gang members (you know, gangs, which are usually from the ghetto and I don't mean the Jewish one), who typically try similar intimidation techniques against their victims in court. Obviously the presiding judge had no feelings of sympathy for the chassidic men who were intimidating the witness. They are probably getting the same treatment that all others get - Since it sounded like this happens all the time based on the judge's comments about gang members, then they probably don't bring the full brunt of the law down on such people unless it's a severe case. Rather than create an unfair double standard, he is probably giving them the standard punishment given to similar criminals of this nature. It doesn't make what they did any less wrong.
ReplyDelete