What She Calls Factual, Some Find Injudicious

Leslie Crocker Snyder used her opening statement in the debate with her two opponents for Manhattan District Attorney Sept. 1 to frame the race as a contest between someone who had devoted her career to fighting crime as a prosecutor and judge and a dilettante who left the city when the going got tough and now wanted a legacy appointment.

That covered her and Cyrus R. Vance, the son of a former Secretary of State who has the blessing of retiring DA Bob Morgenthau. The third candidate, Richard Aborn? Apparently not worth mentioning, never mind castigating.

She established her tone and then maintained it throughout the hour-long face-off at John Jay College, which was televised by NY1. The secondary theme of her pitch was that she was, like Sonia Sotomayor earlier this summer, besieged by false claims that she lacked the temperament for the job she was seeking, as defined by an "Old Boys Network" personified by Mr. Vance, Mr. Morgenthau and a former product of that office, Eliot Spitzer.

Has the Right Resume

If it were a civil service job, Ms. Snyder would seem the obvious choice based on a compelling resume: during her time in the Manhattan DA's Office, she was the first woman to try a homicide case in the city, founded the office's Sex Crimes Bureau and helped write the state's Rape Shield Law. As a Manhattan Criminal Court Judge, she handled numerous high-profile drug cases, inspiring both death threats and a brand of heroin named "25 to Life" emblazoned with her picture on its packets.

John Jay photo WITNESSES FOR THE PROSECUTION: The District Attorney debate at John Jay College featured Leslie Crocker Snyder (left) attacking Cyrus R. Vance Jr. (center) for leaving the city during its toughest times two decades ago in favor of private practice in Seattle, Mr. Vance countering that she lacked the judgment and temperament needed in the job, and Richard Aborn emphasizing the need to reform the justice system with a focus on alternative sentencing.

Mr. Aborn, another former Assistant District Attorney under Mr. Morgenthau, worked as a staff member specializing in police issues for former Public Advocate Mark Green and is best known for his efforts on gun-control legislation. And Mr. Vance, the son of President Carter's Secretary of State, after five years in the DA's Office went to Seattle and spent 17 years as a private attorney handling numerous high-profile civil and criminal cases before returning to the city five years ago.

As might be expected given his 35 years in office, Mr. Morgenthau looms large over the race—so much so that NY1 political anchor Dominic Carter began the questioning by asking Ms. Snyder (followed by the other candidates) whether he was the greatest DA in the office's history.

In her case, this amounted to a loaded question. There apparently were tensions between them long before she ran against Mr. Morgenthau four years ago while suggesting that the then-86-year-old DA had left the office mired in the 20th Century. A measure of how relations further deteriorated during that campaign, which Mr. Morgenthau won by a fairly comfortable margin, could be seen in his comments five months ago on "The Charles Rose Show" that she was "unqualified" to be DA because "she has no humility."

Ms. Snyder had begun her career as a prosecutor when the office was headed by Frank Hogan, whose own lengthy and distinguished tenure had earned him the tabloid nickname "Mr. DA," and, in one of the few instances during the debate where she opted for indirection rather than a straight-ahead assault, she told Mr. Carter, "I believe that the man I worked for most of my time was a great District Attorney, and I have no intention of making comparisons."

Put His Brand On Office

One problem she confronts, however, is that Mr. Morgenthau has held the job for so long, with his phlegmatic but dryly humorous style double-branded into the public consciousness by the performances of Steven Hill as Adam Schiff, the first DA on "Law and Order" (which, ironically, has used Ms. Snyder as a consultant), that it has shaped the image of what a Manhattan DA is supposed to be like.

Mr. Vance is very much in that low-key mold; Ms. Snyder seems determined not to be. Her opening statement was all the more striking because a day earlier, the Daily News— which like the Post and Times has endorsed Mr. Vance—excoriated her in an editorial for a tone it called "hilariously over the top."

In response to Mr. Carter's question about the increasingly harsh tenor of the campaign, with the implication that she was setting it, she said, "I don't believe the tone has grown negative; I believe it has grown factual."

She has had to deal with accusations that she has altered her positions, most particularly on the death penalty—which she previously favored in the most-serious cases but now opposes—to make herself more palatable to Manhattan voters. During the debate, she joined with her two opponents in advocating greater use of alternatives to prison for non-violent offenders with drug problems, saying she was among the first judges "to use a holistic rehabilitation program." All three said they at some point had argued with a cop and had never voted for a Republican, which seemed particularly surprising in her case because of her long friendship with Rudy Giuliani.

But even in the city's most-liberal borough and while appealing to a Democratic electorate, the fact that alternative sentencing was a shared priority and that Mr. Aborn could reject the "broken windows" theory of policing without either of his opponents taking issue made clear how much has changed in the city from the era when, in Ms. Snyder's words, the city was enduring 2,200 murders a year and Mr. Vance was leaving town for safer climes.

The Case for the Prodigal

A primary theme of hers was that she had stayed on to clean up the problem when the going got really tough, and he was the prodigal son who left seeking easier work and spiritual fulfillment. But towards the end of the debate, Mr. Vance earnestly asked those viewers who were parents, "Do you consider your children who've gone off and then come back to the community any less a part of the community because they left and got a life experience?"

He had quietly taken the air out of that argument against him, but Ms. Snyder tried to pump it back up, slamming him for having defended murderers and adding that in the city's time of danger, "While our kids were being assaulted, you were in Seattle."

Mr. Vance responded that murderers were entitled to a vigorous legal representation, particularly in highprofile cases in which the passions stirred by their alleged acts led to their being presumed guilty in the court of public opinion. "If you believe otherwise, you shouldn't be running for this job," he told her.

He seemed very much in the cool mode of Mr. Morgenthau; Ms. Snyder radiated heat. And several times during the debate Mr. Vance made the argument that a DA needed to balance efforts to ensure public safety with a sense of fairness, strongly implying Ms. Snyder was deficient in the latter area.

Reconsiders Pulling Switch

She conceded she had not helped the perception of her by telling a man convicted of murder and rape that if there were a death penalty she would like to administer it herself, saying, "I made an emotional remark which I shouldn't have" in response to the viciousness of the defendant's crimes.

In that context, the remark seems easier to reconcile. But that does not explain why she so proudly recounted the incident in her autobiography, when greater distance from the crime and the reflection that writing usually prompts would have given her the opportunity to cast it differently. And there was also evidence of Ms. Snyder's reveling in the graphic and gruesome aspects of the criminal justice system during the debate.

Asked whether if elected she would reopen the investigation of the Etan Patz case—a 6-year-old boy who was kidnapped from a Soho street 30 years ago and never seen again—she criticized Mr. Morgenthau for never having done so, then offered her own theory that the boy was "probably chopped in pieces, sodomized and a lot worse."

Put Objectivity At Issue

Mr. Vance criticized her for having accepted the endorsement of Etan's father, which he said would raise questions about a fair trial should she be elected and bring an indictment. Arguing that a line had to be drawn, even in heinous cases, separating personal beliefs from prosecutorial practices, Mr. Vance said, "Ms. Snyder stepped over that line."

Mr. Aborn agreed, contending that her conduct "has established the need for a special prosecutor" to try any Patz case should she win the election.

When the candidates were asked whether Mr. Spitzer should have been prosecuted by Mr. Morgenthau's office for patronizing a prostitute, Mr. Vance noted that Federal prosecutors previously concluded there wasn't a basis even though what the then-Governor did was "demeaning and inappropriate." Mr. Aborn said his primary complaint was that there had been "a failure to reassure the public" that this was how the DA normally handled such cases, rather than a matter of special treatment for someone who had once been one of Mr. Morgenthau's star prosecutors.

Ms. Snyder took a shot at Mr. Vance for being willing to have Mr. Spitzer, a former colleague, host a fund-raiser in his behalf until negative publicity led him to reconsider. She said this was symptomatic of "a very cozy relationship . . . part of the Old Boys Network" that included the two men and Mr. Morgenthau.

Mr. Vance parried by noting he had been endorsed by prominent women ranging from Gloria Steinem to U.S. Rep. Nydia Velazquez to Caroline Kennedy, adding, "This kind of attack is exactly what gives people pause about who should take over the job of District Attorney."

Interesting Friends of Her Own

And it's not as if Ms. Snyder's own associations—including friendships with Mr. Giuliani and Bernie Kerik, two of the more-vindictive public officials of our time—don't also raise questions.

They might be assuaged by noting the common disdain the three share for criminal misbehavior (other than Mr. Kerik's own transgressions). But there was also Ms. Snyder's handling of the Linda Schiro case.

Ms. Schiro was the longtime mistress of mobster Gregory Scarpa, and became the star witness in a 2007 case brought by the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office against an FBI agent who allegedly gave information to Mr. Scarpa that facilitated four murders. Her testimony, however, was sharply at odds with what she had told two veteran reporters, Tom Robbins and Jerry Capeci, a decade earlier for a book that was never published, and when they learned of the discrepancies, they came forward and provided their taped conversations with her. After listening to the tapes, the DA's Office withdrew the charges against former FBI Special Agent Lindley DeVecchio.

Brooklyn DA Joe Hynes then asked that a special prosecutor be named to determine whether Ms. Schiro should be charged with perjury. Ms. Snyder volunteered for the assignment. Last October she concluded that there was "insufficient proof of falsity" to charge Ms. Schiro, but she then blistered the two reporters, blaming them for "a regrettable waste of judicial and law-enforcement resources" and, regarding Ms. Schiro, "instead of protecting their source, [they] disgraced her and exposed her to criminal investigation for perjury."

An Unfair Burden

All in all, that's a rather full plate of evil-doing even for nefarious journalists. There was something just a little bit off in her analysis, however: while she lambasted Messrs. Robbins and Capeci for not coming forward "until the eleventh hour" about the discrepancies between Ms. Schiro's statements to them and her testimony, as Mr. Robbins later wrote, how could he know "that Schiro's testimony would go so astray from the facts as she told them years earlier until I heard it from her own mouth on the witness stand"?

Until that actually occurred, the two reporters—and I should acknowledge that Mr. Robbins is a friend—felt their duty was not to report information they had received in confidence for the stillborn book project. Once it appeared possible, however, that testimony they had reason to believe was blatantly false could result in an innocent man's conviction, they decided preventing that miscarriage of justice took precedence over protecting a source. Most people would conclude that faced with a difficult choice, they did the honorable thing.

Settling Her Own Score?

Ms. Snyder, however, may have had baser motives in going after the two reporters. As Mr. Robbins noted, when she ran against Mr. Morgenthau four years ago, that May he published a piece in the Village Voice that featured a headline inspired by one of the nicknames she acquired while a judge: "The Dragon Lady Runs for D.A."

The unflattering headline probably did not bother Ms. Snyder as much as the body of the story, which noted that before joining a prominent law firm that helped finance her run, she had tapped one of its attorneys to handle a restitution fund, earning the firm more than $200,000 in fees.

The piece certainly didn't help her campaign. But criticism by independent reporters like Mr. Robbins is one of the crosses public officials have to bear, and Ms. Snyder's castigation of him (while dragging Mr. Capeci along for the ride) was as gratuitous as it was misleading. It's the type of distinctly injudicious behavior that makes you wonder whether she would use the DA's Office to settle scores rather than administer justice without prejudice.

Her toughness on crime and her smarts helped garner her the endorsements of most of the city's uniformed unions. One factor in their decision, most notably in the case of the Detectives Endowment Association, is continued resentment of Mr. Morgenthau for asking a judge in 2002 to vacate the convictions of five thenteenagers in the Central Park jogger case after a man who was not initially charged confessed to the 1989 crime and was also implicated by DNA evidence.

Youths Not Necessarily Innocent

It was a controversial decision by Mr. Morgenthau, not least because the youths who were freed as a result are still believed by many to have rampaged through the park and crossed the path of the jogger after Matias Reyes beat her into a coma. DEA President Mike Palladino made clear at the time that he believed Mr. Morgenthau was by implication casting aspersions on good detective work by his members and damaging their reputations.

But clearly something had been missed 20 years ago. There was witness testimony against the youths who were convicted that they had attacked several people during a spree in the park, and several of the teens made confessions admitting to taking part in the rape. Yet 13 years passed before Mr. Reyes, the serial rapist whose DNA was found on the victim, confessed to the crime and said he had acted alone.

There had been enormous pressure on the police and the DA's office to solve the case, with screaming tabloid headlines about the attack, including "Wolf Pack" in giant type in the New York Post to describe the youths who were charged and eventually convicted. A high-profile prosecution like that one can take on a momentum that sometimes makes it difficult to go back and do the extra bit of checking that ties up all the loose ends, makes sure that nothing has been missed and that justice is fully done.

Admitting a Big Mistake

It took more than a decade before that key missing piece finally turned up, primarily because the initial arrests had seemed to produce a satisfactory result—young menaces had been taken off the streets. As chagrined as Mr. Palladino was by the vacating of the convictions, the decision had to be at least as distressing to Mr. Morgenthau: his office, after all, is the one that ultimately decides what cases to bring, and how long to take in preparing them. And so admitting its error placed a larger responsibility on his office than on anyone else.

In the interest of fairness, however, it's hard to see that he had any choice, and it's to his credit that he acted swiftly when that became apparent.

Ms. Snyder, asked about preventing recurrences, said she would create a "Second Look Bureau" of experienced prosecutors to review those cases that needed it.

The question is, would she be able to resist the outside pressure that sometimes exists to go forward with a case before it was nailed down, or to admit error and risk being roasted by the media for doing so? Based on her handling of the Schiro case and her campaign style, you'd have to say there exists more than a bit of reasonable doubt.