In search of love and votes, Charles J. Hynes, the Brooklyn
district attorney, cannot seem to stop tripping over himself.
Last week, he went on a television and radio show for the
Orthodox Jewish community and denounced Sam Kellner. Bearded and intense, a
bubbling fountain of words, Mr. Kellner is one of the rare few in the Hasidic
community who spoke publicly about the plague of child sexual abuse.
He helped
the district attorney build cases against prominent Hasidic leaders, including
a man accused of molesting Mr. Kellner’s own 16-year-old son.
Or at least Mr. Kellner spoke until Brooklyn prosecutors
turned around two years ago and charged him with trying to extort his son’s
accused abuser, the Satmar cantor Baruch Lebovits.
The weakness of the case against Mr. Kellner is difficult to
overstate. On Monday in State Supreme Court, Mr. Hynes’s prosecutors pleaded
for more time to reinvestigate their rapidly disintegrating case.
None of which appeared to have given pause to Mr. Hynes. “I
believe there was a substantial effort by Mr. Kellner to gain money by making
up stories,” he told the host of the program, Zev Brenner, last week. “I think
we have a substantial case.”
It appears Mr. Hynes, who often emphasizes the management
experience he has accumulated over many decades, has violated the state’s rules
of professional conduct, which prohibit prosecutors from offering “any opinion
as to the guilt or innocence of a suspect” in a criminal matter.
“That’s an expression of his opinion of Kellner’s guilt, and
he can’t say that,” said Prof. Stephen Gillers of New York University, one of
the nation’s leading legal ethicists. “Hynes may have tried to stop short, but
he didn’t stop short enough.”
The case against Mr. Kellner comes with curious aspect piled
upon curious aspect.
Mr. Lebovits’s lawyers pounced upon the indictment of Mr.
Kellner. They pointed to it, and to legal technicalities, and persuaded a state
appeals court to overturn their client’s conviction.
The two lawyers for Mr. Lebovits — Arthur L. Aidala and Alan
M. Dershowitz — make a formidable and intriguing pair. A respected trial
lawyer, Mr. Aidala is a former Brooklyn prosecutor and a former campaign
manager for Mr. Hynes.
He is the registered agent for the Charles Hynes
Association. Mr. Aidala, his family, and his legal firm contributed $5,100 to
the district attorney last year.
Mr. Dershowitz, meanwhile, rendered his own service to Mr.
Hynes. Earlier this year, Pro Publica, a respected investigative news Web site,
published a critical account of Michael F. Vecchione, a close friend of Mr.
Hynes and chief of the district attorney’s rackets bureau.
The news site’s
account detailed “a staggering array of misconduct” by Mr. Vecchione as he led
the prosecution of a young black man, Jabbar Collins, in the killing of an
Orthodox Jew. After 15 years in prison, a court overturned Mr. Collins’s
conviction; he is now suing the Brooklyn district attorney’s office and Mr.
Vecchione.
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