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Abe George Seeks To Upend Hynes

Little-Known Prosecutor Hits Veteran DA on Orthodox Abuse

By Paul Berger

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Nevertheless, Hynes’s recent failures have attracted a lot of publicity.

In April, Darrell Dula, a 25-year-old black man, was released after a year in jail, following revelations that a Hasidic woman recanted her original claim that she was raped and pimped out by Dula and three friends. The woman’s statement was never passed to the men’s defense attorneys.

One week later, Hynes’s much heralded 2010 conviction of ultra-Orthodox travel agent Baruch Lebovits on sex abuse charges was reversed by an appeals court because of prosecutorial misconduct during the trial.

And then there’s Hynes’s refusal to name those accused or convicted of abusing ultra-Orthodox children.

Such cases make up one-tenth of 1% of some 27,000 arrests that Hynes’s office deals with each year. Yet George says it is the only topic journalists want to talk about.

George is happy to discuss the sex abuse scandal. But he really wants to make violent crime the focus of his campaign.

Although crime has fallen sharply since Hynes took office, recent statistics reveal that almost 40% of murders in New York are committed in Brooklyn. The majority of those murders are concentrated in low-income, largely black communities.

Referring to some of the borough’s toughest neighborhoods, George said, “People in East New York, Brownsville, and [Bedford-Stuyvesant] send their kids to school and don’t know if they will come back.”

Contact Paul Berger at berger@forward.com or on Twitter @pdberger