District Attorney of New York County | |
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Incumbent Alvin Bragg since January 1, 2022 | |
Formation | 1801 |
First holder | Richard Riker |
Website | ManhattanDA.org |
Sep 03, 2020 · Those cases, prosecuted in Manhattan, rocked New York’s Capitol with charges of corruption, bid-rigging or bribery leveled against former state legislative leaders, a close aide to Gov. Andrew M ...
May 15, 2015 · Preet Bharara, United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Robert T. Johnson, the District Attorney for Bronx County, announced today the unsealing of a Complaint charging New York State Assemblyman ERIC STEVENSON with accepting bribes in exchange for official acts. STEVENSON is charged with taking more than $22,000 in bribes …
May 13, 2015 · The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York has an especially long and proud tradition of absolute independence. After all, we were founded in 1789; we have prosecuted some of the most storied cases in the history of the nation; and we have shown time and again that no individual or institution is beyond the law’s reach.
Apr 04, 2013 · Preet Bharara, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, speaks regarding arrests made in a public corruption complaint against New York Assemblyman Eric Stevenson in New York April 4 ...
Department overview | |
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Website | justice.gov/usao/nys |
Map | |
Southern District of New York |
District | United States Attorney |
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New York, Eastern | Breon S. Peace * |
New York, Northern | Carla B. Freedman * |
New York, Southern | Damian Williams * |
New York, Western | Trini E. Ross * |
Although the convicted politicians are arranged by presidential terms in chronological order, many of the crimes have little or no connection to who is president. Since the passage of 20th Amendment on January 23, 1933, presidential terms have begun on January 20 of the year following the presidential election; prior to that, they began on March 4.
John Hipple Mitchell Senator (R-OR) was involved with the Oregon land fraud scandal, for which he was indicted and convicted while a sitting U.S. Senator (1905). Henry B. Cassel (R-PA) was convicted of fraud related to the construction of the Pennsylvania State Capitol (1909).
Nicholas Mavroules (D-MA) was convicted of extortion, accepting illegal gifts and failing to report them on congressional disclosure and income tax forms. Mavroules pleaded guilty to fifteen counts in April 1993 and was sentenced to a fifteen-month prison term (1993).
John Dean (R) White House Counsel, convicted of obstruction of justice, later reduced to felony offenses and served 4 months.
Frank Brasco (D-NY) sentenced to 5 years in jail and fined $10,000 for conspiracy to accept bribes from a reputed Mafia figure who sought truck leasing contracts from the Post Office and loans to buy trucks (1974).
Irving Whalley (R-PA) received suspended three-year sentence and fined $11,000 in 1973 for using mails to deposit staff salary kickbacks and threatening an employee to prevent her from giving information to the FBI (1973).
Wes Cooley (R-OR), was convicted of having lied on the 1994 voter information pamphlet about his service in the Army. He was fined and sentenced to two years' probation (1997) He was later convicted of income tax fraud connected to an investment scheme. He was sentenced to one year in prison and to pay restitution of $3.5 million to investors and $138,000 to the IRS.
D-Queens. Fined after he pleaded guilty in 2008 to driving while ability impaired. Sabini was arrested in 2007 on a driving while intoxicated charge. Months after he was convicted, facing a tough primary challenge, Sabini was hired by Gov. David Paterson to be chairman of the New York State Racing and Wagering Board.
He was fined $330,000 by a state ethics board. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver had approved confidential settlements with some of the women. The Assembly was preparing to start the process of expelling Lopez, who was first elected in 1984, when he resigned.
D-Bronx. Sentenced to three years in prison in 2014 after being convicted of bribery and other public corruption charges. He was charged in 2013 with accepting $22,000 in bribes from businessmen who built an adult day care center in return for legislation to impose a moratorium on the opening of competing centers.
A Democrat from New York City, was fined $62,125 in 2010 by a state ethics commission for soliciting and accepting free Yankees tickets, and then lying under oath to cover up his actions. He was fined 11 days before his term ended. A state senator before he was elected lieutenant governor, Paterson became governor in 2008 when Eliot Spitzer resigned in a prostitution scandal.
Charged in 2013 with unlawful possession of marijuana after he was stopped for speeding. The charge was dismissed after Katz performed community service. Katz had voted against bills that would legalize marijuana for medical uses prior to his arrest. Katz was first elected assemblyman in 2010.
There have been 41 accused of misdeeds in the past 12 years. Some are awaiting trial, some have been convicted, some resigned amid controversy without criminal charges. Some were rewarded with re-election or other government jobs.
A Democrat from New York City, resigned in 2008 days after it emerged that he had been caught on a federal wiretap discussing plans to meet a prostitute in Washington. Spitzer was known as Client-9 by Emporers Club VIP, the business that supplied prostitutes.
The President of the United States has the authority to appoint U.S. Attorneys, with the consent of the United States Senate, and the President may remove U.S. Attorneys from office. In the event of a vacancy, the United States Attorney General is authorized to appoint an interim U.S. Attorney. Before March 9, 2006, such interim appointments expired after 120 days, if a Presidential appointment had not been approved by the Senate. Vacancies that persisted beyond 120 days were filled through interim appointments made by the Federal District Court for the district of the vacant office.
Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on February 6. He said that the seven were fired for job performance issues and not political considerations; these statements lead several of the dismissed attorneys, who had been previously silent, to come forward with questions about their dismissals, partially because their performance reviews prior to their dismissal had been highly favorable.
White House spokesman Scott Stanzel stated that some of the emails that had involved official correspondence relating to the firing of attorneys may have been lost because they were conducted on Republican party accounts and not stored properly. "Some official e-mails have potentially been lost and that is a mistake the White House is aggressively working to correct." said Stanzel, a White House spokesman. Stonzel said that they could not rule out the possibility that some of the lost emails dealt with the firing of U.S. attorneys. For example, J. Scott Jennings, an aide to Karl Rove communicated with Justice Department officials "concerning the appointment of Tim Griffin, a former Rove aide, as U.S. attorney in Little Rock, according to e-mails released in March, 2007. For that exchange, Jennings, although working at the White House, used an e-mail account registered to the Republican National Committee, where Griffin had worked as a political opposition researcher."
He also stood by his decision to dismiss the attorneys, saying "I stand by the decision and I think it was the right decision". Gonzales admitted that "incomplete information was communicated or may have been communicated to Congress" by Justice Department officials, and said that "I never saw documents. We never had a discussion about where things stood."
A subsequent report by the Justice Department Inspector General in October 2008 found that the process used to fire the first seven attorneys and two others dismissed around the same time was "arbitrary", "fundamentally flawed" and "raised doubts about the integrity of Department prosecution decisions".
Allegations were that some of the attorneys were targeted for dismissal to impede investigations of Republican politicians or that some were targeted for their failure to initiate investigations that would damage Democratic politicians or hamper Democratic-leaning voters.
Attorneys by deleting two provisions: (a) the 120-day maximum term for the Attorney General's interim appointees, and (b) the subsequent interim appointment authority of Federal District Courts. With the revision, an interim appointee can potentially serve indefinitely (though still removable by the President), if the President declines to nominate a U.S. Attorney for a vacancy, or the Senate either fails to act on a Presidential nomination, or rejects a nominee that is different than the interim appointee.
Concurring Justice O’Connor, joined by Justices Scalia and Thomas, rejected such balancing. Young was inapplicable, Justice O’Connor explained, because “it simply cannot be said” that a suit to divest the state of all regulatory power over submerged lands “is not a suit against the State.” 159
That Edelman in many instances will be a formal restriction rather than an actual one is illustrated by Milliken v. Bradley, 151 in which state officers were ordered to spend money from the state treasury in order to finance remedial educational programs to counteract the effects of past school segregation; the decree, the Court said, “fits squarely within the prospective-compliance exception reaffirmed by Edelman .” 152 Although the payments were a result of past wrongs, of past constitutional violations, the Court did not view them as “compensation,” inasmuch as they were not to be paid to victims of past discrimination but rather used to better conditions either for them or their successors. 153 The Court also applied Edelman in Papasan v. Allain, 154 holding that a claim against a state for payments representing a continuing obligation to meet trust responsibilities stemming from a 19th century grant of public lands for benefit of education of the Chickasaw Indian Nation is barred by the Eleventh Amendment as indistinguishable from an action for past loss of trust corpus, but that an Equal Protection claim for present unequal distribution of school land funds is the type of ongoing violation for which the Eleventh Amendment does not bar redress.
129 Ex parte Young, 209 U.S. 123, 159–60 (1908). The opinion did not address the issue of how an officer “stripped of his official . . . character” could violate the Constitution, in that the Constitution restricts only “state action,” but the double fiction has been expounded numerous times since. Thus, for example, it is well settled that an action unauthorized by state law is state action for purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment. Home Tel. & Tel. Co. v. City of Los Angeles, 227 U.S. 278 (1913). The contrary premise of Barney v. City of New York, 193 U.S. 430 (1904), though eviscerated by Home Tel. & Tel. was not expressly disavowed until United States v. Raines, 362 U.S. 17, 25–26 (1960).
120 Judicial reluctance to confront government officials over government-held property did not extend in like manner in a federal context, as was evident in United States v. Lee, the first case in which the sovereign immunity of the United States was claimed and rejected. United States v. Lee, 106 U.S. 196 (1882). See Article Iii, ?/span>??Suits Against United States Officials.” However, the Court sustained the suit against the federal officers by only a 5-to-4 vote, and the dissent presented the arguments that were soon to inform Eleventh Amendment cases.
Tort Actions Against State Officials. —In Tindal v. Wesley, 163 the Court adopted the rule of United States v. Lee, 164 a tort suit against federal officials, to permit a tort action against state officials to recover real property held by them and claimed by the state and to obtain damages for the period of withholding. The immunity of a state from suit has long been held not to extend to actions against state officials for damages arising out of willful and negligent disregard of state laws. 165 The reach of the rule is evident in Scheuer v. Rhodes, 166 in which the Court held that plaintiffs were not barred by the Eleventh Amendment or other immunity doctrines from suing the governor and other officials of a state alleging that they deprived plaintiffs of federal rights under color of state law and seeking damages, when it was clear that plaintiffs were seeking to impose individual and personal liability on the officials. There was no “executive immunity” from suit, the Court held; rather, the immunity of state officials is qualified and varies according to the scope of discretion and responsibilities of the particular office and the circumstances existing at the time the challenged action was taken. 167
Young arose when a state legislature passed a law reducing railroad rates and providing severe penalties for any railroad that failed to comply with the law. Plaintiff railroad stockholders brought a federal action to enjoin Young, the state attorney general, from enforcing the law, alleging that it was unconstitutional and that they would suffer irreparable harm if he were not prevented from acting. An injunction was granted forbidding Young from acting on the law, an injunction he violated by bringing an action in state court against noncomplying railroads; for this action he was adjudged in contempt. If the Supreme Court had held that the injunction was not permissible, because the suit was one against the state, there would have been no practicable way for the railroads to attack the statute without placing themselves in great danger. They could have disobeyed it and alleged its unconstitutionality as a defense in enforcement proceedings, but if they were wrong about the statute’s validity the penalties would have been devastating. 116 On the other hand, effectuating constitutional rights through an injunction would not have been possible had the injunction been deemed to be a suit against the state.
Young was inapplicable, Justice O’Connor explained, because “it simply cannot be said” that a suit to divest the state of all regulatory power over submerged lands “is not a suit against the State.” 159.