Ten curre nt and former New York prosecutors who judges say illegally screened out potential jurors because of race or religion are facing ethics complaints that could prompt investigations or disciplinary actions.
Judges have already ruled either during trial or in appeals that all 10 prosecutors broke the law. But a group of law professors is now bringing ethics complaints against the prosecutors in the hopes of holding them accountable for what they did.
They have not yet faced any public discipline, according to state court records. Several of them were even promoted.
In some cases, the people who the prosecutors convicted filed appeals arguing that jury selection was biased and their convictions were overturned — but only after they had spent years behind bars.
The law professors are bringing the complaints, filed Monday with attorney grievance committees and shared first with Gothamist, as a way of finally holding the prosecutors accountable for violations that in some cases date back decades. The group, which calls itself Accountability NY, started submitting complaints against prosecutors accused of misconduct in 2021.
They said the violations are emblematic of a larger problem in the court system: attorneys illegally excluding jurors based on race and other aspects of their identity. Experts said it’s an illegal practice that undermines people's right to a fair trial — especially people of color.
The complaints name prosecutors in five district attorneys’ offices, including Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens. In one 2018 case, a judge found that a prosecutor acted illegally when he struck all the Latino prospective jurors for a Latino man’s trial. In another that same year, a judge ruled that a prosecutor illegally removed the only two non-white people for the trial of an Afghan-American. In one case, a former prosecutor admitted to using notes filled with racist and sexist instructions — including “No Hispanics” and “Stay away from grandmotherly types” — to avoid choosing diverse juries in the 1990s.
Notes taken in the 1990s by former Queens prosecutor Christopher McGrath that outlined types of jurors to include or exclude based on their race, religion, gender and neighborhood.
“Diversity is an essential safeguard,” said Peter Santina, managing attorney of Civil Rights Corps’ Prosecutorial Accountability Project, which helped to file the complaints. “A representative jury can mean the difference between someone being wrongfully convicted or not.”
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