Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes’ prosecutors used hotel rooms as
private jail cells to hide away reluctant witnesses and coerce them into giving
false testimony, a bombshell court filing claims.
The attorney for Jabbar Collins — who was freed after 15
years in prison for the murder of a rabbi after a federal judge found
prosecutorial missteps by Hynes’ office — filed court papers yesterday claiming
the witness-badgering tactic was part of widespread misconduct in the DA’s
Office and was a clear violation of constitutional protections.
Lawyer Joel Rudin, who has already filed a $150 million
wrongful-prosecution suit against the DA’s Office, cited a deposition of a
former Hynes employee who said investigators “were trained to bring material
witnesses directly to the DA’s Office, instead of to court, for investigative
questioning, and they would later be held against their will at hotels.”
“Hynes’s office was
running a private jail system where witnesses were illegally interrogated and
forcibly detained indefinitely,” Rudin wrote in the Brooklyn federal-court
filing.
The explosive new allegations expand upon a wide range of
similar charges Collins made two years ago in a federal civil-rights lawsuit,
where he says such illegal tactics played a central role in his wrongful
conviction.
Collins’ suit charged that a rogue Hynes prosecutor “would
gain the involuntary custody of witnesses from which he would coerce false
statements and testimony,” often using unethical methods to secure a court
order sanctioning the detention.
Collins has accused Hynes of turning a blind eye to his
investigators’ misconduct during the high-profile probe into the killing of
Rabbi Abraham Pollack in Williamsburg during a 1995 armed robbery.
His lawsuit claims that two key prosecution witnesses in the
murder case against him were coerced.
One was Angel Santos, who later told a federal judge that he
had been threatened by Hynes’ Rackets Bureau chief, Michael Vecchione, after
Santos balked at taking the witness stand at Collins’ trial.
“He told me he was going to hit me over the head with a coffee
table or lock me up for a couple of years for perjury,” Santos told a federal
judge at a 2010 hearing.
Collins’ lawsuit alleges that Santos was “unlawfully
imprisoned” in a Bronx jail as “a material witness,” and threatened with
physical harm if he did not testify as directed.
“Santos was locked behind bars at the Bronx House of
Detention, housed with accused criminals, for more than a week,” the lawsuit
charges.
Another witness, Edwin Oliva, was coerced into becoming a
prosecution witness and hidden away in an upstate jail, the lawsuit claimed.
“Oliva was sent to Ulster Correctional Facility. He was
informed that he would remain imprisoned upstate until he agreed to ‘cooperate’
with the DA’s Office,” Collins says in his 2011 lawsuit.
Two weeks ago, Rudin asked Brooklyn federal Judge Frederic
Block to order the DA’s Office to produce evidence about “material witnesses
held in ‘Hotel Custody’ and/or against their will” and a wealth of other
information as part of the mandatory evidence exchange process that precedes a
civil trial.
The judge has not yet ruled on the issue, but Hynes’ office
has argued that some of this material is private and cannot be released.
Several sealed court hearings have focused on this struggle over evidence in
Collins’ federal civil-rights case.
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