Morgenthau for D.A.
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Robert Morgenthau is the candidate for district attorney The New York Sun endorses in New York County. We’d have waited until Friday to express our view, but the endorsement of his rival, Leslie Crocker Snyder, by the New York Times Tuesday, was so filled with error, ageism, and illogic that we don’t mind advancing our schedule. The Times and Judge Snyder have been unable to advance any reason for opposing Mr. Morgenthau except one – the notion that he’s too old. But the fact is that Mr. Morgenthau is one of the liveliest, sharpest, most effective, and honest prosecutors New York County, or any American county, has ever had. He’s an American institution for a reason, and the people of New York wish him a long life with many productive years ahead.
The Times dresses its age discrimination against Mr. Morgenthau with the logic of term limits, though, until voters forced limits on the City Council, the Times had opposed term limits on principle. Even the Times’s term-limits-type argument is illogical, since the paper has nothing but praise for the D.A.’s abilities and mental capacity. Looking for something on which to criticize the D.A., the Times fetches up with the fact that his office opposed what the Times calls community courts, “although,” it says, “some have been established in Manhattan in the last decade or so.” One of these is sometimes called the “New York Times court.” It’s a court in Midtown that deals with prostitutes and pickpockets and the like in the Times Square area. It was launched, in part, with what the New York Law Journal, in 1993, put at $2.5 million in funding from private sources that included the New York Times Company Foundation.
By our lights, since the Times endorsement was going to deal with such experimental courts, its editors owed its readers a disclosure of the newspaper’s financial involvement. The Times, after all, has brought in the great Byron Calame as public editor to help bring the paper up to Wall Street Journal standards. Mr. Calame, call your office. The fact is that Mr. Morgenthau’s hostility to these privately funded courts is principled and on the record, as the New York Law Journal reported back in 1993, quoting Mr. Morgenthau’s office and Legal Aid officials as suggesting that the courts would drain resources from the existing criminal justice system. Mr. Morgenthau told us yesterday that he felt the resources should have been used in Washington Heights and downtown, meaning for the criminal justice system generally. “Business groups shouldn’t be able to buy their own courts,” he said.
The Times also makes much of the notion that Mr. Morgenthau defaulted in the case of a man who, as the Times put it, “had been sent to prison in a fatal nightclub shooting nearly 15 years ago and was recently cleared, based on a belated finding that there was inadequate evidence to support the conviction.” What malarkey. Mr. Morgenthau’s office agreed to a set-aside of the conviction, based on new evidence. It’s not at all certain that such evidence would have cleared the person whose conviction was vacated, only that it would have helped his case.
What Judge Snyder and her partisans fail to point out is that during Mr. Morgenthau’s tenure so far, his office has handled 3 million criminal cases. He has an extraordinary record of being willing to seek a set-aside of a conviction when warranted, even, as in the case of the murder of the Central Park jogger, in the face of much protest from police and others. But even more importantly, the Manhattan district attorney has an astounding record at fighting crime. New York County has seen a historic drop in crime on Mr. Morgenthau’s watch; the drop in Manhattan has been the steepest of any borough in the city.
And not just the normal crimes all county prosecutors deal with. Mr. Morgenthau has shown himself over a long span to be one of the most broad-gauged and versatile of any prosecutor in history, focusing on petty crimes, major crimes, homicides, and then white collar crimes, winning major convictions – most recently against Tyco – and breaking important ground in the protection of the financial markets and systems that are at the heart of the city’s economy. One can only guess that the reason the ex-U.S. attorney of the Southern District, Mary Jo White, is plumping for Judge Snyder is that she is still smarting at getting scooped so often by New York’s own D.A.
Ms. White was not alone among federal officials. Many have felt Mr. Morgenthau’s competition – and not just on financial and white-collar crimes, but also in the fight against financial shenanigans at the United Nations. The recent guilty plea by a senior U.N. official implicated in the oil-for-food scandal was given to the federal authorities only after Mr. Morgenthau’s office had executed a search and come up with the crucial evidence. And it’s not only the fight against white-collar crime where Mr. Morgenthau has taken the lead, but also in the war against Islamic terrorism, where in ways one can only glimpse our own D.A. has been way ahead of the most sophisticated authorities. One of our embassies in South America was once startled to find Mr. Morgenthau’s investigators pursuing a lead and promptly wired Washington to ask why the federal authorities were lagging.
We don’t mind admitting that Mr. Morgenthau is not going to be district attorney forever, though unlike nearly every other elected official, he’s not angling for higher office. He loves his job and is dedicated to it. Mr. Morgenthau’s record is not his alone. He has assembled and nurtured an extraordinary office, filled with bright, upwardly mobile prosecutors to whom he’s fiercely loyal. Our hope is that when he feels he’s ready to retire, he’ll let New Yorkers know early, so that a full and varied field can contest to be his successor. But we’re not eager to see that happen, not this year or four years hence. If the proverbial man from Mars were to arrive in our city and make a list of the changes that need to be made, a change of district attorney in New York County would be the last item on the list.