Charles ‘Joe’ Hynes, former Brooklyn District Attorney, is now facing a variety of federal charges involving the misuse of funds from criminal activities, i.e. drug busts and auto confiscations. Much of the evidence is based on thousands of potentially incriminating e-mails. He really does face prison time, but his trial will demonstrate all the tricks of the trade that may allow one high placed perpetrator to go free while indigent and even innocent persons go behind bars.
This being said, Hynes’s behavior is more reprehensible on humanitarian grounds than on financial ones. It is more difficult to assign legal responsibility for wrongful convictions than for crimes of cupidity. Al Capone was locked up for tax evasion and not murder, after all. Hynes presided over scores of wrongful convictions and his office blocked all but a handful of efforts to free the wrongly convicted. Those are crimes against humanity, as Rubin Carter was wont to say.
One request they made of David McCallum was to produce a body for a body, in other words, find the actual murderer who owns up to the crime and we’ll let you go. Not an easy task after twenty-five years! More insidious was after they agreed to test evidence and they discovered DNA belonging to a felon inside the car–a fact completely inconsistent with the scenario presented at trial–they opposed any further evidence testing. The most pressing need in that office was always to burnish their reputations or enhance their chances for re-election. Hynes’s office practiced corruption of the lowest order–a willingness to sacrifice the lives of others, especially of young African Americans, to maintain power. I cannot think of someone more deserving of a prison sentence than the man who presided over such travesties: Charles “Joe” Hynes.