Joseph P. Fried

The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his son, Todd, said.

In January, after seven terms in office, Brown announced he would not seek re-election.

Brown, a former judge who left the calm of an appellate court for the pressures of a big-city prosecutor’s office, was known in his early years on the job for showing up at crime scenes, an unusual practice for the city’s district attorneys.

He said those visits, sometimes occurring after rolling out of bed in the middle of the night, gave him a better understanding of the cases his office would be handling. Those who knew him said the visits reflected his hands-on approach to the job.

Brown was an associate justice of Brooklyn’s Second Department of the Appellate Division of the state Supreme Court, when Gov. Mario Cuomo, a fellow Democrat, named him the district attorney of Queens County in June 1991 on an interim basis, succeeding John J. Santucci, a 14-year incumbent who had retired in the middle of his fourth term.

Santucci bequeathed to Brown one of the most rancorous cases then pending in the city’s courts. It involved murder charges against five New York City police officers that Santucci’s office had obtained from a grand jury weeks before in the death of a car-theft suspect. The office said one officer had choked the man, and four others had “acted in concert.” Witnesses said the officers had punched and kicked the man.

The officers contended they had struggled to subdue the man, who they said was violently resisting arrest. Some legal experts called the murder charges against the four who were not accused of the choking prosecutorial overreach.

Brown agreed, dropping all charges against those four shortly after taking office. Moreover, he reduced the charges against the officer who allegedly did the choking to manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide, calling those charges more appropriate. The officer was acquitted of both counts at trial.

The family of the dead man, Federico Pereira, and his supporters were outraged, contending that Brown had made a political calculation that a more lenient stance toward police would help his chances of winning a full term in a special election later in 1991.

Brown’s aides disputed the accusation, noting he had become the front-runner when Cuomo gave him the interim appointment. He said his actions reflected the perspective of someone who had spent a decade as an appellate judge.

Brown easily defeated his Republican opponent in the election, and was re-elected every four years afterward with multiparty backing, most recently in 2015, making him the longest-serving district attorney in Queens.

Years later, Brown found himself dealing with another emotionally charged case involving police action: the 2006 killing of a man, Sean Bell, and the wounding of two other men in a hail of 50 police bullets fired at their car — without justification, Brown’s office charged — during a chaotic confrontation outside a strip club in Jamaica, Queens.

Three detectives were tried on charges that included manslaughter and reckless endangerment. The detectives said the car had hit one of them and they had believed the men had a gun. No gun was found in the car. The wounded men said they and Bell had been desperately trying to flee because they believed the detectives in plainclothes were robbers.

Some critics of the police said that the incident was a vivid example of the kind of excessive force they said police routinely used against unarmed black men, even though two of the prosecuted detectives were also black.

In an interview with The New York Times afterward, Brown, noting the challenges the case had posed to his office, said he had told his staff that the office had the respect of the police and the confidence of Queens residents and that he wanted “to be certain that we come out of this investigation with that reputation intact.”

The detectives were acquitted at trial of all the charges. Critics of the prosecution contended that its trial tactics had significantly helped the defense. Brown responded that the decisions on tactics had been “appropriately made.”

Among the district attorney office’s most widely publicized successes under Brown were the murder convictions of two men charged with killing five employees of a Wendy’s restaurant in 2000; prosectors said the defendants had sought to eliminate witnesses to a $2,400 robbery the men had committed there.

Another major case was the 1995 murder conviction of Dr. David Benjamin for a fatal abortion.

An obstetrician, Benjamin had performed a late-term abortion, though he lacked the skills for such a procedure, while appealing the revocation of his license for gross incompetence and negligence in five other cases. He did not give the woman any medical assistance as she bled to death, Brown said.

This “cumulatively demonstrated his depraved indifference to human life,” he said, and warranted a murder charge rather than a lesser charge of manslaughter, which many had expected.

Civic leaders and politicians praised Brown for giving a high degree of attention to mundane crimes whose prosecution was nevertheless important to neighborhood residents.

In 1999, Claire Shulman, then the Queens borough president, cited his efforts against offenses like prostitution and graffiti. “He helped close 45 houses of prostitution on Roosevelt Avenue,” she said, “and that had been a very serious quality-of-life issue for the people who lived around it.”

But Brown also drew jabs for convictions that were overturned because of prosecutorial misconduct. In one instance a man won a $3.5 million judgment for having spent 12 years in prison on a 1992 conviction for attempted-murder. A federal court had overturned the conviction, finding that the prosecution had presented false testimony from its key witness.

The lawsuit leading to the payment charged that about 80 Queens convictions over a 15-year period, ending in 2003, had been overturned because of prosecutorial wrongdoing. Brown replied that “over two-thirds of the cases cited” were prosecuted before he became district attorney, and that all the cases listed “represent less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the hundreds of thousands” prosecuted during that period. He said “many” of the dismissed convictions were followed by convictions in retrials or by guilty pleas.

Brown was particularly proud of the Queens Court Academy, a high school established on his office’s premises as an alternative sentencing program for young defendants.

“Young offenders are not only spared incarceration, but are given the opportunity to complete high school and avoid rearrest,” he said in a statement in January in announcing his retirement. “There is no other similar program in New York state or, to my knowledge, in the country.”

Richard Allen Brown was born in Brooklyn on Nov. 13, 1932, and raised in Queens.

He graduated from Hobart College, in Geneva, New York, and New York University School of Law and worked as a counsel to Democratic leaders of the state Legislature from 1961 to 1969. He was New York City’s lobbyist in Albany until 1973. Over the next eight years he served as a judge in New York City Criminal Court and in state Supreme Court, a trial bench and as counsel to Gov. Hugh L. Carey. Carey named him to the Appellate Division in 1981.

In addition to his son, Brown is survived by his wife, Rhoda; his daughters, Lynn Brown Foodman and Karen Brown; a sister, Carolyn Straker, and two grandchildren.

Brown, whom colleagues called Judge Brown long after he became district attorney, liked to tell the story of how he got another name stemming from his court days — in fact, from his very first day presiding in a courtroom, in November 1973.

He had been assigned to Manhattan Criminal Court, where a defendant was to be arraigned on a charge of menacing his estranged girlfriend. Suddenly the man pulled out a gun, shot and wounded the woman and then either shot himself in an unsuccessful suicide attempt or was shot by a police officer. As the gunfire sounded, Brown ducked under the bench, earning him, he recalled, the nickname Duck Down Brown.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/04/obituaries/richard-a-brown-dead.html" id="5c9f0311-de8a-3b23-a9f9-214e67f3137e">The New York Times</a>.

Richard A. Brown, Former Queens District Attorney, Dies at 86

NEW YORK — Richard A. Brown, the Queens County district attorney who in almost three decades in that office prosecuted police officers accused of committing unjustified killings, robbery defendants who executed potential witnesses and a doctor convicted of murder for fatally botching an abortion, died Saturday in a hospice facility in Redding, Connecticut. He was 86.

The cause of death was complications connected to Parkinson’s disease, his son, Todd, said.

In January 2019, Brown said he would not seek re-election.

A former judge who left the calm of an appellate court for the pressures of a big-city prosecutor’s office, Brown was also known in his early years on the job for showing up at crime scenes, an unusual practice for the city’s district attorneys.

He said those visits, which sometimes occurred shortly after he had rolled out of bed in the middle of the night, gave him a better understanding of the cases his office would be handling. Those who knew Brown said the visits also reflected his hands-on disposition and his conspicuously high energy levels.

Brown was an associate justice of Brooklyn’s Second Department of the Appellate Division of the state Supreme Court, when Mario Cuomo, a fellow Democrat who was then the governor, named Brown the district attorney of Queens County in June 1991, succeeding John J. Santucci, a 14-year incumbent who retired in the middle of his fourth term.

Among the cases Santucci bequeathed to Brown was the most rancorous one then pending in the city’s courts. It involved murder charges against five New York City police officers that Santucci’s office had obtained from a grand jury weeks before in the death of a car-theft suspect. The office said one officer had choked the man, and that the other four officers had “acted in concert.” Witnesses said the officers had punched and kicked the man.

The officers said they had struggled to subdue the man, who they said was violently resisting arrest. Some legal experts called the murder charges against the four who were not accused of the choking prosecutorial overreach.

Brown agreed, dropping all charges against those four shortly after taking office. He reduced the charges against the officer who allegedly did the choking to manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide, which Brown called more appropriate. (The officer was acquitted of both counts at trial.)

The family of the dead man, Federico Pereira, and his supporters were outraged by the actions of Brown, accusing him of doing what he thought would bolster his chances of winning a full term at a special election later in 1991. Brown’s aides disputed the accusation, noting he had become the front-runner when Cuomo gave him the interim appointment. He said his actions reflected the perspective of someone who had spent a decade as an appellate judge.

Brown easily defeated a Republican opponent in the election, and was re-elected every four years afterward with multiparty backing, most recently in 2015, making him the longest-serving district attorney in Queens.

Three detectives were tried on charges that included manslaughter and reckless endangerment. The detectives said the car had hit one of them and they believed the men had a gun. No gun was found in the car, and the wounded men said they and Bell had been desperately trying to flee because they feared the plainclothes detectives were robbers.

Some critics of the police claimed that the incident exemplified the use of excessive force on unarmed black men, even though two of the prosecuted detectives were also black.

Brown described the case’s challenge in an interview with The New York Times. He said he had told his staff that the office had the respect of the police and the confidence of Queens residents, and “I want to be certain that we come out of this investigation with that reputation intact.”

Among the office’s most widely publicized successes under Brown were the murder convictions of two men charged with killing five employees of a Wendy’s restaurant in 2000, in an effort to eliminate witnesses to the $2,400 robbery they had committed there and the 1995 murder conviction of Dr. David Benjamin for a fatal abortion.

An obstetrician, Benjamin had performed a late-term abortion, though lacking the skills to do such a procedure, while appealing the revocation of his license for gross incompetence and negligence in five other cases. He had not given the woman any medical assistance as she bled to death, Brown said. This “cumulatively demonstrated his depraved indifference to human life,” Brown said, and warranted a murder charge rather than the lesser charge of manslaughter that many had expected.

Brown was praised by civic leaders and politicians for the high degree of attention they said he gave to mundane crimes that were important to neighborhood residents.

But there were also jabs at Brown for convictions that were overturned for prosecutorial misconduct, including one in which a man won $3.5 million for his 12 years in prison for a 1992 attempted-murder conviction. A federal court overturned the conviction, finding that the prosecution had presented false testimony from its key witness.

The lawsuit leading to the payment charged that about 80 Queens convictions over a 15-year period ending in 2003 had been overturned because of prosecutorial wrongdoing. Brown replied that “over two-thirds of the cases cited” were prosecuted before he became district attorney, and that all the cases listed “represent less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the hundreds of thousands” prosecuted during that period. He said “many” of the dismissed convictions were followed by convictions in retrials or by guilty pleas.

He graduated from Hobart College and New York University School of Law and worked as a counsel to Democratic leaders of the state Legislature from 1961 to 1969 and as New York City’s lobbyist in Albany until 1973. Over the next eight years he served as a judge in New York City Criminal Court and in state Supreme Court, a trial bench and as counsel to Gov. Hugh L. Carey. Carey named him to the Appellate Division in 1981.

Brown is survived by his wife, Rhoda; daughters, Lynn Brown Foodman and Karen Brown; son, Todd; sister, Carolyn Straker, and two grandchildren.

Brown, whom colleagues called “Judge Brown” long after he became district attorney, liked to tell the story of how he got another name stemming from his court days — in fact, from his very first day presiding in a courtroom, in November 1973.

He was assigned to Manhattan Criminal Court, and a defendant who was to be arraigned on a charge of menacing his estranged girlfriend pulled out a gun in the courtroom, shot and wounded the woman and then either shot himself in an unsuccessful suicide attempt or was shot by a police officer. As the gunfire sounded, Brown ducked under the bench, earning him, he recalled, the nickname Duck Down Brown.

NEW YORK — Richard A. Brown, the Queens County district attorney since 1991 who prosecuted police officers accused of committing unjustified killings, men who executed potential witnesses and a doctor convicted of murder for fatally botching an abortion, died while under hospice care in a rehabilitation center in Redding, Connecticut, on Saturday morning. He was 86.

His wife, Elizabeth Miller, said the cause was complications of lung cancer.

Miller was found guilty in 1991 of defrauding clients of his private law practice in the 1980s, when he was an Assembly member from Brooklyn but before becoming speaker of the Democratic-controlled body.

An appeals court threw out the conviction in 1993, saying his actions had not constituted felonies. But Miller, who had been in the Assembly for 21 years and speaker for five, said he would not resume his political career.

“I don’t think elective office is for me,” he said. “Maybe it’s a little ego. You were king in your own domain; it’s hard to come back into the system as something else.”

He also said his legal expenses in the case, which had not involved any of his actions as a public official, had ruined him financially. He went on to become a successful lobbyist.

As speaker, Miller had been a member of the triumvirate that controlled state government, along with the governor and the state Senate majority leader.

Miller, a brash, garrulous, glad-handing liberal, cut his political teeth with a reform-oriented Democratic club in Flatbush. He was known for a confrontational manner in controlling his Democratic herd in the Assembly and in dealing with Cuomo, a fellow liberal Democrat, who was governor from 1983 to 1994.

Almost immediately after becoming speaker in 1987, replacing Stanley Fink, Miller began publicly feuding with Cuomo over issues like taxes and an ethics code for state officials. Many politicians said that ego and a battle for dominance in Albany fed their feud as much as differences on the issues.

“I was not going to play follow the leader,” Miller declared in 1987, explaining why he was pressing for a much larger income tax cut than the governor said was possible. Miller called the governor’s position a bluff, Cuomo reversed his stand. and a larger cut was enacted.

Cuomo painted Miller as weak on ethics and that year won public support for a stronger ethics code than Miller and the leader of the Republican-controlled state Senate, Warren Anderson, had wanted.

“Sometimes it is necessary to draw the line, to show people what it is that defines you as a person, in this case as a political person,” Cuomo said.

Miller also fought anti-crime measures that Cuomo supported.

With a crack epidemic spreading, the governor sought to toughen penalties for selling the drug. Miller, as chairman of the Assembly committee with jurisdiction over criminal justice legislation, fought Cuomo’s proposal. He objected in particular to a provision calling for a sentence of up to life in prison for sellers of as few as three vials of crack, about $50 worth, arguing that small-time offenders would be punished too harshly. A version of the legislation that mandated somewhat lesser penalties was passed in 1988.

As speaker, Miller worked to protect social welfare and education programs in the preparation of the state budget. In 1989, he pressed successfully to eliminate cuts in Cuomo’s proposed budget that, he said, would have hurt schools and recipients of Medicaid and welfare.

But like Cuomo, Miller opposed efforts to restore capital punishment in the state. (It was reinstated in a law enacted in the 1990s, after both men had left office, though a court ruling made the law inoperable.) Also like Cuomo, Miller opposed efforts to undo abortion rights.

Melvin Howard Miller was born in Brooklyn on July 24, 1939, to Henry and Frieda (Chaiet) Miller. His father drove a milk truck, and his mother was a homemaker.

He served in the Army Reserve before graduating from Brooklyn College in 1961 and New York University School of Law in 1964. He was first elected to the Assembly in 1970 to represent Flatbush and nearby areas.

He married Elizabeth Mohr in 1961. In addition to his wife, with whom he lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, he is survived by a daughter, Susan Miller; a son, Lawrence; a brother, Irwin; a sister, Darlene Feldman; and four grandchildren.

In the case that toppled Miller, a federal jury in Brooklyn found that he and his law partner, Jay Adolf, had cheated an investment group they represented in the group’s purchase, for resale, of more than 100 apartments in a Brooklyn complex that was being converted from rental to cooperative.

The prosecution charged that the men and a co-conspirator had secretly diverted eight of the apartments to themselves, and that the resales of those apartments provided $200,000 in profit for Miller and Adolf that would have otherwise gone to the investment group.

The two men denied engaging in any crimes and held that even if their purchases had been improper — which they also disputed — the response should have been civil litigation.

Miller, who contended that he was the victim of a “political witch hunt,” was automatically expelled from the Assembly upon the verdict under a law mandating the ouster of state legislators convicted of felonies. He and Adolf were each sentenced to three years’ probation, fines and community service.

But 18 months later, the appellate judges ruled that while “Miller and Adolf’s dealings with the group may not have been a model of candor and disclosure,” their actions “did not constitute felonies.”

In a 2002 interview with The New York Times, Miller acknowledged that the lobbying business “has been very good to me financially,” but said he remained “a little bitter” about his ouster from “something I loved to do.”

“That was exciting,” he said of his life in politics. “And I prefer the exciting to the remunerative.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/obituaries/mel-miller-dead.html" id="8465f581-0387-3365-adf7-3c8249f2aa65">The New York Times</a>.

Mel Miller, 79, New York Assembly Speaker With Tarnished Career, Dies

Mel Miller, who rose to the highest ranks of New York state government as speaker of the state Assembly and publicly feuded with Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, but who was forced from office because of a fraud conviction that was later overturned, died Friday in Manhattan. He was 79.

His death was confirmed by his son David.

Reid was the scion of a newspaper publishing family whose grandfather was the editor and principal owner of the renowned New York Tribune and whose father merged it in the 1920s with the equally storied New York Herald to form The Herald Tribune. Reid was The Herald Tribune’s president and editor in the 1950s.

The newspaper was respected for its high-quality journalism but dogged by financial troubles that would help bring its demise in the 1960s; the family sold its controlling interest in 1958. Reid entered government service the next year when President Dwight D. Eisenhower named him ambassador to Israel.

In 1961, another Republican, Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, appointed Reid chairman of New York’s state Commission Against Discrimination. Some politicians saw the move as intending to help make Reid better known in the state should he seek elective office. His family’s ties to the Republican Party went back to the 19th century.

He did seek office the next year, running for the party’s nomination for the House of Representatives seat from a predominantly Republican district in eastern Westchester. The county’s Republican leaders backed him over their party’s incumbent, Edwin B. Dooley, who was seeking re-election. Reid defeated him in the primary and handily won the general election.

During his House tenure, which ran through 1974, Reid supported anti-poverty and civil rights legislation and efforts to improve urban areas, curb housing discrimination and strengthen Social Security. He voted so often with the House’s Democratic majority that some conservative Republicans said the initials O.R. stood for “Occasionally Republican.”

When a Westchester official spoke out against distributing federal surplus food to impoverished families in the county, saying it would be degrading to the recipients, Reid responded that when people are hungry, “pride doesn’t interfere with taking free food.”

Though known for its affluent communities — including Purchase, where Reid then lived — his district also had growing pockets of poverty in New Rochelle, White Plains and Mount Vernon.

“This is really a national district, with a real cross section of points of view. It’s not all affluence or all poverty,” Reid told The Times in 1970. “It can’t be all suburbia when it starts at the Bronx line. And the broader the base, the more hopeful it is, because the more different kinds of people are willing to work.”

Reid repeatedly introduced bills to protect journalists from being compelled by federal courts and other governmental authorities to disclose confidential sources. The bills, which did not pass, were designed “to defend against possible repression of the news media,” he said.

In his first three re-election runs, Reid had no opponent in the primaries and won the general elections by large margins, enhanced by the votes of many Democrats. But in 1970, with conservatives having gained strength among Westchester Republicans, he had a challenger for the nomination, whom he narrowly beat before again winning the general election easily.

In 1972, Reid announced he was quitting the Republican Party and would seek re-election as a Democrat because, he said, the Republican Party had “moved to the right.” He acknowledged that the prospect of another stiff primary challenge — and the likelihood of opposition in the party to his running for statewide office — also factored into his decision. Now as a Democrat, he won re-election again.

Two years later, rather than seek another House term, Reid entered the race for the Democratic nomination for governor. As he began to tour the state in 1973, he sharply criticized Rockefeller’s “slavish allegiance” to President Richard M. Nixon — a sharp break with his recent Republican loyalties.

“We have had enough imperious paternalism from Albany and Washington,” he told Democrats in western New York in May 1973, months before officially announcing his candidacy. “Finally we must restore to Washington and Albany an administration that is capable of leading through unity, eschewing divisiveness — whether it be the Watergate and Southern strategy by Washington or one-man decisions in Albany.”

Reid dropped out of the race when he failed to gain substantial support beyond Westchester. After Rep. Hugh L. Carey of Brooklyn won the Democratic nomination and the 1974 general election, he appointed Reid as his commissioner of environmental conservation.

But Reid resigned after 16 months because of differences with Carey over the handling of matters like General Electric’s discharge of highly toxic PCBs into the Hudson River. In 1983 he ran unsuccessfully for Westchester County executive.

Ogden Rogers Reid was born in Manhattan on June 24, 1925, a son of Ogden Mills Reid and Helen Rogers Reid. His father, who had taken over The Tribune in 1912 after the death of his father, Whitelaw Reid, presided over the 1924 acquisition of The Herald and the papers’ merger. After Ogden M. Reid died in 1947, his wife was The Herald Tribune’s president and dominant figure for several years.

Ogden R. Reid served in the Army as a paratrooper in the 11th Airborne Division during World War II. In 1949 he graduated from Yale and married Mary Louise Stewart before joining The Herald Tribune, where he worked as a mail clerk, photographer and reporter before becoming vice president in 1953. Two years later, just 29 years old, he succeeded his older brother, also named Whitelaw Reid, as president and editor.

Ogden Reid’s efforts to halt the paper’s falling circulation and financial slide were unavailing, and in 1958 the Reids sold a controlling interest to John Hay Whitney, the U.S. ambassador to Britain. But Whitney was no more successful, and in 1966 the paper was merged with others in trouble into an amalgam called The World Journal Tribune. It closed the next year.

Besides his son David, Reid is survived by his wife, Mary; four other sons, Stewart, Michael, William and Ogden; a daughter, Elisabeth Taylor; and 19 grandchildren.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/03/obituaries/ogden-reid-dead.html" id="4f461faa-dcea-3ad0-a365-c2f28b6767fd">The New York Times</a>.

Ogden R. Reid, Herald Tribune Editor and Congressman, Dies at 93

Ogden R. Reid, the former editor of The Herald Tribune who represented congressional districts in Westchester County, New York, for 12 years, first as a Republican and then as Democrat, died Saturday at his home in Waccabuc, New York. He was 93.

His son Sean said a specific cause had not been determined. In the past Hynes had undergone heart surgery and been treated for leukemia, and he had been hospitalized again while he was in Florida. He died in the hospital.

Hearty, gregarious and blunt, Hynes was first elected Brooklyn district attorney in 1989 after his success as a special state prosecutor in a 1986 racial attack on three black men in Howard Beach, Queens. A gang of white teenagers chased one of the men, Michael Griffith, onto a highway, where he was struck and killed by a car.

The surviving victims and their lawyers said they distrusted the Queens district attorney’s office and refused to cooperate with its investigation. Mario Cuomo, then the governor, appointed Hynes to take over the case, and he won manslaughter convictions against three of the main defendants.

The case brought Hynes more attention than he had received as New York City’s fire commissioner, and as a special prosecutor for fraud in the nursing home industry and for corruption in the city’s criminal justice system.

His achievements as district attorney included the conviction his fellow Democrat Clarence Norman Jr., the party’s Brooklyn leader, on corruption charges that involved coercing judicial candidates to hire the party’s favored campaign consultants.

Hynes also won the convictions of two State Supreme Court justices for taking bribes to fix cases. He successfully prosecuted a ring of funeral directors, who had plundered body parts and sold them for use in transplants and medical research. And he won a case against an ultra-Orthodox rabbi on charges of kidnapping a boy from his nonreligious Jewish parents.

Hynes earned much praise for initiating a program in which nonviolent drug offenders were given opportunities for treatment instead of prison. And he set up a separate bureau to deal with domestic violence, an initiative inspired in part, he said, by his own upbringing in an abusive household. His supporters maintained that his office had contributed significantly to the sharp drop in crime in Brooklyn over his decades in office.

But Hynes lost the office in a landslide in 2013. He was unable to persuade voters that his accomplishments over six terms as district attorney outweighed more recent controversies over wrongful murder convictions and his handling of pedophilia cases among ultra-Orthodox Jews.

Hynes’ office was accused of prosecutorial misconduct in three murder cases in which people had served up to two decades in prison despite being wrongfully convicted. There were also allegations that the office had been complicit with an unethical detective in obtaining questionable convictions in many other homicide cases.

Hynes denied that his office had engaged in misconduct. And he said in early 2013 that a conviction integrity unit he had formed would review all 40 to 50 homicide convictions — most of them occurring during his tenure — to which the detective, Louis Scarcella, had contributed.

A Painful Defeat

The integrity review still had a long way to go when Hynes was defeated by Kenneth P. Thompson, a former federal prosecutor, who had made the misconduct accusations a centerpiece of his campaign. Thompson also questioned whether Hynes could carry out a “truly independent” review of the cases worked on by Scarcella, who was accused of falsifying confessions and using the same crack-addicted prostitute as a witness in multiple cases.

By October 2016, when Thompson died of cancer at 50, the unit had expanded its review to more than 100 cases, including many not worked on by Scarcella and some involving lesser charges than homicide. The review had led to conviction reversals for more than 20 people.

In the child sex-abuse cases, victims’ rights advocates had long expressed concern that Hynes was reluctant to pursue accusations against ultra-Orthodox Jews because their rabbis were some of his strongest political supporters.

Hynes denied this, saying he had prosecuted many such cases. But in response to the criticisms, he created a new program to reach out to the young ultra-Orthodox victims and their families. That effort, however, drew yet more criticism when, accompanying the program, his office set a new policy of not publicizing the names of ultra-Orthodox defendants, though it continued to publicly identify others charged in such cases.

Hynes responded that when he had publicized the names of ultra-Orthodox defendants in the past, it had often led to identification and intimidation of the young victims and their families, “and most of our cases fell apart.”

Still, he vowed that he would do more to crack down on any intimidation. But the damage was done: The controversy became more fodder for the Thompson campaign.

Hynes’ re-election loss was rare for an incumbent district attorney in New York City. Voters “just didn’t care what he had done in the past,” said Kenneth K. Fisher, a former City Council member who had known Hynes for decades. “They wanted to know what he would do for them now, and he didn’t have a great answer to that.”

Hynes told his disappointed supporters, “I’ve had a great, great run.”

In the case that paved the way for that run, Hynes, in a booming voice at the 1987 trial of the major Howard Beach defendants, evoked a “night of fists, fear, terror and hatred” in which the man who died on the highway was chased into a “chasm of death.”

Moments like that led to Hynes’ portrayal as the hero of an NBC television docudrama titled “Howard Beach: Making a Case for Murder” (Daniel J. Travanti played Hynes), and politicians spoke of him as a possible Democratic mayoral candidate in 1989.

Though he did not lack ambition for higher office — he unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination for attorney general in 1978 and 1994 and for governor in 1998 — Hynes decided not to enter the mayoral race. He said he did not want to challenge David N. Dinkins, a fellow Democrat, who was running that year, successfully, to become the city’s first black mayor. Instead, Hynes ran for Brooklyn district attorney.

Hynes suffered two big setbacks in his first term. In one case, a black teenager, Yusuf Hawkins, was shot to death in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn after being attacked by a group of bat-wielding young whites who had surrounded him. Seven people were charged with murder: the gunman and six who were accused of acting in concert with him.

The gunman was convicted of murder, but all the others were acquitted of that charge; some were found guilty of lesser charges and others were totally acquitted. Critics maintained that Hynes’ office had handled the case incompetently. Hynes cited the fact that a defendant who had agreed to be a major prosecution witness had reneged.

Violence in Crown Heights

The second case stemmed from four days of violence in 1991 in the Crown Heights neighborhood, where bands of black youths attacked Hasidic residents after a car driven by a Hasidic man accidentally struck and killed a black child, Gavin Cato. Another Hasidic man, 29-year-old Yankel Rosenbaum, was fatally stabbed, and a teenager, who police said possessed a bloodstained knife and whom the mortally wounded man identified, was arrested near the scene.

Despite what seemed a strong case, the defendant, Lemrick Nelson, was acquitted of all charges. A jury in a federal trial later found that he had committed the stabbing and convicted him of violating the victim’s civil rights. A state commission concluded in 1993 that lapses by Hynes’ office in gathering forensic evidence and in presenting inconsistent police testimony had contributed to the acquittal.

Hynes fired back with a 23-page rebuttal that called his office’s work diligent and accused the commission of displaying “a misunderstanding of trial tactics.”

In another prominent setback, in 2007, Hynes had to drop, in midtrial, a murder case against a retired FBI supervisor who had been accused of helping a Mafia informant commit four killings. An old tape recording emerged in which the main prosecution witness said the agent had not been involved in the killings.

“I have my fans and my detractors, and I understand that,” Hynes said in a 1994 interview with The New York Times. “It doesn’t bother me to take the shots. I’m a big boy.”

There were fans and detractors over his handling of capital punishment. Hynes had opposed the death penalty long before the state revived it in 1995. Hynes said the death penalty was of questionable morality and ineffective in preventing crime, and he criticized it while campaigning for governor in 1998.

But by then he had sought death sentences in five cases, the most by any district attorney in the state since capital punishment had been restored. He said at the time that he had been duty-bound to seek the penalty in appropriate cases while the law was on the books, but that “as someone running for governor, my responsibility is to tell you the law is a sham.”

A 2004 court ruling made the 1995 law inoperable, with nobody having been executed.

Hynes won his fifth term in his first close race, finishing on top in the Democratic primary — which in heavily Democratic Brooklyn was usually tantamount to election to the office — by just 4 percentage points. He won his sixth term in 2009 without opposition in the Democratic primary or the general election.

When the voters rejected him four years later, they had to do it twice.

After Thompson defeated him in the Democratic primary, 55 to 45 percent, Hynes said he would accept the result. But he changed his mind and ran hard in the general election as the candidate of the Republican and Conservative parties — only to be crushed: Thompson won more than 70 percent of the vote.

Following the election, city investigators concluded Hynes had misused office funds to pay a campaign consultant, but federal prosecutors said there was not enough evidence to support criminal charges. In 2018, he acknowledged that he had erred in using office email during his campaign and agreed to pay a fine of $40,000.

Gov. Carey’s Choice

Charles Aiken Joseph Hynes — he took Joseph as his confirmation name and was called Joe by all who knew him — was born in Brooklyn on May 28, 1935. His father was “a drunk and a wife-beater,” he told The New York Times in 1990 in explaining why one of his first acts as district attorney was to establish a bureau dealing exclusively with domestic violence.

“Often, the first thing I remember when I’m in a tough spot is my mother’s screams,” Hynes recounted in an autobiographical section of “Incident at Howard Beach: The Case for Murder,” a 1990 book he wrote with Bob Drury.

His mother, Jean Hynes, was a daughter of Irish Catholic immigrants who had landed in Boston; she became a real estate broker. (In the book, Hynes did not identify his father by name but wrote lovingly of his mother, “She never lost her deep compassion for those she called unlucky.”)

Hynes attended St. Ann’s Academy in Manhattan (now Archbishop Molloy High School in Queens) and earned bachelor’s and law degrees at St. John’s University. After a stint in the Marines and several years with the Legal Aid Society and in private practice, he became an assistant district attorney in Brooklyn in 1969, rising to first assistant.

In 1975, Gov. Hugh Carey chose him as a special prosecutor to pursue reports of widespread fraud in the nursing home business; the governor later expanded Hynes’ jurisdiction to all programs receiving Medicaid funds. By 1979, Hynes had reported 94 convictions.

In 1985, after stints as the city’s fire commissioner from 1980 to 1982 and in private practice, he was named the special prosecutor for corruption in New York City’s criminal justice system. He soon won the convictions of six 77th Precinct officers accused of extorting money and drugs from narcotics dealers and staging burglaries. But he and the Police Department publicly disputed responsibility for the longtime failure to apprehend an officer from another precinct who had been robbing drug dealers and selling cocaine.

Hynes married Patricia Pennisi, a registered nurse, in 1963. In addition to his son Sean, he is survived by his wife; their other children, Kevin and Patrick Hynes, Jeanne Cook and Lisa Kellachan; and 17 grandchildren. He lived in Brooklyn and Breezy Point in the Rockaways.

In addition to his book on Howard Beach, Hynes wrote a novel, “Triple Homicide” (2007), about police corruption.

In the Howard Beach book, Hynes wrote that he had “always found it difficult to rejoice over convictions.” But he added, “I’d dedicated my life to the belief that irrational human passion must be tamed by the law.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/obituaries/charles-j-hynes-dies.html" id="4762c1bd-46a4-3d79-a9f7-87b5f99bb62a">The New York Times</a>.

Charles J. Hynes, Brooklyn DA in a Tumultuous Era, Dies at 83

NEW YORK — Charles J. Hynes, who as Brooklyn district attorney for 24 years sent corrupt officials to jail and won praise for his approach to nonviolent drug cases, but who lost his bid for a seventh term in a swirl of controversies, died Tuesday while on vacation in Deerfield Beach, Florida. He was 83.

Hynes suffered two big setbacks in his first term. In one case, a black teenager, Yusuf Hawkins, had been shot to death in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn when a group of bat-wielding young whites surrounded him. Seven people were charged with murder: the gunman and six who were accused of acting in concert with him.

After Thompson defeated him in the Democratic primary, 55 to 45 percent, Hynes said he would accept the result and end his campaign. But he changed his mind and, angering many Democrats, ran hard in the general election as the candidate of the Republican and Conservative parties — only to be crushed: Thompson won more than 70 percent of the vote.

Charles J. Hynes, Brooklyn D.A. in a Tumultuous Era, Dies at 83

His son Robert Jr. confirmed the death. Sweet, who lived in Manhattan, also had a home in Ketchum, where he was on vacation. At his death he was a senior federal judge in the Southern District of New York.

Sweet was Lindsay’s chief deputy mayor (and had been his former Yale Law School roommate) from late 1966 through 1969, representing the mayor in tense labor disputes.

These included a teachers’ strike in 1967 that kept most of the city’s 1 million public school students out of school for 2 1/2 weeks, and a nine-day sanitation workers’ strike the next year that left garbage piled up throughout the city.

Those fights, largely over wages and working conditions, were nothing new in New York City’s long history of labor relations. But three later strikes by the teachers in the fall term of 1968 proved far more intractable, because they revolved around who would control the schools.

The strikes, which emptied classrooms for a total of eight weeks, grew out of a plan intending to improve public education by decentralizing the city’s school system. Pilot projects had been set up in three school districts, including Ocean Hill-Brownsville, in a predominantly black and Puerto Rican area of Brooklyn.

The strikes were called after the district’s board had summarily moved to transfer a group of teachers and administrators out of the district. Ten of the teachers resisted, but the board persisted even after a trial examiner for the school system did not find enough evidence to support the board’s accusations that the 10 had tried to sabotage community control or had done unsatisfactory work.

The teachers’ union saw itself in a must-win fight to protect its members’ rights and discourage such actions by other local boards. Many supporters of the district’s leadership, which was largely black, saw the strikes as an effort by a largely white and heavily Jewish union to squelch community control. Anti-Semitic and racist accusations punctuated the conflict.

Sweet, on Lindsay’s behalf, sought to persuade the union, the district’s leadership and the Board of Education to compromise. Though he won praise for his low-key manner and his ability to relieve tensions in the negotiations — Sid Davidoff, an assistant to the mayor, told The New York Times that Sweet “can deal with anybody, even an adversary, in almost a friendly way” — only the state was able to end the conflict. It suspended the district board, and the involuntary transfers were made subject to grievance procedures in the union’s contract.

Sweet’s cordial negotiating manner — the “Sweet schmooze,” City Hall colleagues called it — was also an asset in Albany, New York, where he often traveled to appeal for more state financial aid for the city.

Sweet stepped down as deputy mayor at the end of 1969, after Lindsay was elected to a second term, and returned to private law practice as a partner at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom. President Jimmy Carter named him to the U.S. Court for the Southern District of New York, in Manhattan, in 1978.

One of Sweet’s major rulings came in 1992, when he declared that the state’s law against begging on the streets was an unconstitutional violation of free speech.

While the government has a “valid interest” in preserving public order, he said, “the interest in permitting free speech and the message that begging sends about our society predominates.”

He added, “A peaceful beggar poses no threat to society,” while “aggressive panhandling” could be prosecuted under existing laws.

The ruling was upheld on appeal. In 1996, New York City enacted its own ban on aggressive panhandling. Panhandling remains illegal in the city’s subways and buses and at Transit Authority stations.

Perhaps Sweet’s most controversial words were expressed off the bench. In a 1989 speech at the Cosmopolitan Club in Manhattan, he called for legalizing heroin, crack cocaine and all other illegal drugs.

The war on drugs was “bankrupt” and futile and overwhelming the courts, he maintained. If legalized, he said, the drugs could be produced by pharmaceutical companies, regulated like alcohol and kept unlawful for minors.

Those advocating legalization expressed gratification at having a federal judge on board. Critics argued that Sweet was defeatist, and that heroin and crack were more addictive than alcohol.

In another prominent case, Sweet, in 2003, dismissed a lawsuit that sought to hold the McDonald’s Corp. liable for obesity and ill health in teenagers.

‘If a person knows or should know that eating copious orders of supersized McDonald’s products is unhealthy and may result in weight gain,” Sweet wrote, “it is not the place of the law to protect them from their own excesses.”

He went on to note: “Nobody is forced to eat at McDonald’s. (Except, perhaps, parents of small children who desire McDonald’s food, toy promotions or playgrounds, and demand their parents’ accompaniment.)”

Robert Workman Sweet was born in Yonkers, New York, on Oct. 15, 1922, the son of James and Delia (Workman) Sweet. His father was a lawyer.

Sweet attended the Horace Mann School in the Bronx and the Taft School in Connecticut before graduating from Yale in 1944. He spent two years in the Navy, commanding a submarine chaser in the Atlantic, his family said. He graduated from Yale Law in 1948.

That same year he married Lois Clapp. The marriage ended in divorce. In 1973 he married Adele Hall Leopold, a daughter of Dorothy Schiff, at the time publisher of The New York Post. Adele Sweet was assistant publisher of The Post under her mother and later headed the Dorothy Schiff Foundation. Adele Sweet died in December at 93.

In addition to Robert Jr., Sweet is survived by two daughters, Deborah Given and Eliza H. Sweet; another son, Ames; seven grandchildren; four great-grandchildren; six stepchildren; and many step-grandchildren and step-great-grandchildren.

After law school Robert Sweet worked largely in private practice for 17 years. He was also active in Republican Party politics and served as Manhattan borough coordinator in Lindsay’s first race for mayor, in 1965. The victorious Lindsay brought him to City Hall as his executive assistant, and made him chief deputy mayor after a year.

Among Sweet’s many former law clerks was former Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York.

In his later years Sweet was an avid figure-skater, beginning many days with a morning skating session at the Chelsea Piers Sky Rink in Manhattan. He started skating after his wife, Adele, a skater herself, gave him figure skates as a birthday present.

“Figure skating is often precarious at any age, and the fact that the judge does this at 92 is extraordinary,” an instructor, Marni Halasa, told Corey Kilgannon of The New York Times one morning in 2015 for an article about the judge’s hobby.

The judge proceeded to practice a fox trot ice-dance routine as well as maneuvers like swing rolls, 3-turns, Mohawk turns and crossovers.

Robert Sweet saw parallels between skating and judging.

“You really have to pay attention to detail, and it requires balance and hard work,” he said. “It doesn’t make me a better judge or anything like that, but working hard at anything makes you better.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/obituaries/robert-w-sweet-dead.html" id="a0a306e8-a0a3-3200-a8d8-236e23608d04">The New York Times</a>.

Robert W. Sweet, who as Mayor John V. Lindsay’s top deputy worked to end some of the most rancorous conflicts in 1960s New York, and who as a longtime federal judge struck down a state ban on begging on the streets, died Sunday in Ketchum, Idaho. He was 96.

Robert W. Sweet, Mayor's Deputy Turned Federal Judge, Dies at 96

The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his son, Todd Brown, said.

In January, after seven terms in office, Brown announced he would not seek re-election. In March, with his seventh term in office scheduled to end Dec. 31, Brown announced that he would resign on June 1, “the 28th anniversary of my first assuming this office.”

He said he had hoped to finish out the term, but given his health issues, it had become “increasingly difficult to fully perform the powers and duties of my office in the manner in which I have done since 1991.”

In an interview with The New York Times afterward, Brown, noting the challenges the case had posed to his office, said he had told his staff that the office had the respect of the police and the confidence of Queens residents and that he had wanted “to be certain that we come out of this investigation with that reputation intact.”

Another major case was the 1995 murder conviction of Dr. David Benjamin for a fatal abortion. An obstetrician, Benjamin had performed a late-term abortion, though he lacked the skills for such a procedure, while appealing the revocation of his license for gross incompetence and negligence in five other cases. He did not give the woman any medical assistance as she bled to death, Brown said.

NEW YORK — Richard A. Brown, the Queens County district attorney who in almost three decades in that office prosecuted police officers accused of committing unjustified killings, robbery defendants who executed potential witnesses and a doctor convicted of murder for fatally botching an abortion, died Saturday in a hospice care facility in Redding, Connecticut. He was 86.

Joseph P. Fried

Articles written by the author

Richard A. Brown, Former Queens District Attorney, Dies at 86

Richard A. Brown, Former Queens District Attorney, Dies at 86

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Ogden R. Reid, Herald Tribune Editor and Congressman, Dies at 93

Charles J. Hynes, Brooklyn DA in a Tumultuous Era, Dies at 83

Charles J. Hynes, Brooklyn D.A. in a Tumultuous Era, Dies at 83

Robert W. Sweet, Mayor's Deputy Turned Federal Judge, Dies at 96

Richard A. Brown, Queens district attorney, dies at 86

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Ogden R. Reid, editor of storied newspaper and congressman, Dies at 93