"... Once they're handcuffed, they're in their underwear and you speak
to them a little bit more, ‘Are you going to fight us? You like pants?’
You know, if that's the case, if they’re compliant, we dress them and
give them water, whatever they need so they would be comfortable.”
Brooklyn DA Chharles Hynes
The NY Daily News reports:
Prosecutors in Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes' office routinely arrested witnesses and held them against their will in locked hotel rooms to force them into testifying, bombshell court papers charge.
The lawyer for Jabbar Collins, who spent 15 years in prison for murdering a Brooklyn rabbi until he was ordered free by a federal judge, has uncovered what he believes is new evidence of widespread prosecutorial misconduct in the 1990s.
“Hynes’ office was running a private jail system where witnesses were illegally interrogated and forcibly detained indefinitely,” charged lawyer Joel Rudin in court papers filed Wednesday in connection with Collins' $150 million wrongful conviction lawsuit.
Rudin cites the deposition of a former investigator in the D.A.’s office who described the practice of using warrants to arrest witnesses and stashing uncooperative ones in hotel rooms to make sure they don’t disappear.
“There are circumstances where the person will say, ‘I’m not coming. No way.’ And then ... we would immediately handcuff them and take them away," said Christopher Salsarulo, now a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent, according to a transcript of his deposition.
"... Once they're handcuffed, they're in their underwear and you speak to them a little bit more, ‘Are you going to fight us? You like pants?’ You know, if that's the case, if they’re compliant, we dress them and give them water, whatever they need so they would be comfortable.”
Rudin noted that witnesses who are the subject of a warrant or subpoena are supposed to be brought to court, not the D.A.’s office for grilling which is “potentially coercive.”
Collins’ conviction imploded in large part as a result of revelations that key witnesses against him were threatened and held against their will by prosecutor Michael Vecchione unless they testified at the trial.
A former supervising paralegal in the homicide bureau testified in a deposition in May that she routinely signed Vecchione’s name on sworn affidavits that were then submitted to a judge to order the arrest of witnesses.
“If they were not happening in Brooklyn, we would associate such practices with a police state,” Rudin said in letter filed Wednesday in Brooklyn Federal Court.…
Read it all here.