In a stunning about-face, former Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes admitted in a recent deposition that he did not believe a man exonerated for murder was guilty — even though one of his prosecutors insisted, as the man’s conviction was vacated, “We believe in this defendant’s guilt.”
Hynes threw Assistant District Attorney Kevin Richardson under the bus during a sworn deposition in connection with a $150 million wrongful conviction lawsuit filed in Brooklyn Federal Court by Jabbar Collins, who spent nearly 16 years behind bars for a rabbi’s death before he was freed in 2010.
“The statement that we believe ‘he did it’ was a reference to Kevin Richardson, who believed at the time … that Mr. Collins was guilty,” Hynes explained, according to a transcript of the Dec. 19 deposition, obtained exclusively by the Daily News.
“I didn’t have that view because there was no case anymore,” Hynes said under questioning by Collins’ lawyer, Joel Rudin.
Hynes added that while Richardson may have believed Collins was guilty of murdering Rabbi Abraham Pollack in a 1994 Williamsburg robbery, “I no longer held that position.”
Richardson was sent to federal court to defend the case in 2010 amid mounting evidence that his superior, Michael Vecchione — who originally tried the case — had committed prosecutorial misconduct by coercing and threatening witnesses to make them testify against Collins.
At the time, Brooklyn Federal Judge Dora Irizarry called the DA’s handling of the case “shameful.”
Hynes responded with a statement defending Vecchione and vowing there would be no internal investigation of the allegations of misconduct.
But Hynes, who was voted out of office last November, was singing a different tune at the deposition, where he acknowledged that “someone involved in that case” failed to inform Collins’ defense lawyer that a key witness had recanted.
“It was an absolute obligation on the part of a prosecutor with that kind of information to immediately turn it over to the defense attorney,” Hynes said.
“There is absolutely, never has been, any doubt in my mind that it was a clear unethical … act of misconduct.”
The Collins case is among dozens of questionable murder convictions during Hynes’ 23 years in office that have come to light in recent years and drawn heavy criticism from three federal judges.
Hynes established a panel to examine the cases but still lost his reelection bid by a landslide to ex-federal prosecutor Kenneth Thompson.
Vecchione retired after Thompson’s victory, and Richardson was fired by the new DA.
Thompson has already released three wrongfully convicted men from the Hynes era and dropped an appeal in the case of fourth man exonerated in a murder.
Hynes has never publicly corrected Richardson’s contention that Collins is guilty, and it has even been repeated by the city’s lawyer in charge of defending the suit.
“It is a disgrace that the corporation counsel’s office is still defending this case by suggesting through innuendo, and in the absence of any such evidence, that Mr. Collins is guilty,” Rudin said in a letter to Brooklyn U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert Levy.
