{"id":179798,"date":"2017-10-22T19:39:00","date_gmt":"2017-10-23T00:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2017\/10\/22\/headline-of-the-day-66\/"},"modified":"2017-10-22T19:39:00","modified_gmt":"2017-10-23T00:39:00","slug":"headline-of-the-day-66","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2017\/10\/22\/headline-of-the-day-66\/","title":{"rendered":"Headline of the Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cy Vance Represents Everything Wrong with the Justice System<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

\u2014The Outline<\/i><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Of course, Paul Blest is referring to Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr., not his dad who was secretary of state.<\/p>\n

Vance is almost certainly going to be reelected next year, but it now appears that he let the rich and powerful skate in exchange for campaign donations:<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re looking for an example of unequal treatment perpetuated in our criminal justice system, you should look no further than the decisions made by the Manhattan District Attorney\u2019s office<\/span>

<\/span>Last week, as reports of Harvey Weinstein\u2019s decades of sexual harassment and assault became public, news emerged that Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus \u201cCy\u201d Vance Jr. had declined to prosecute<\/a> Weinstein in March 2015 for misdemeanor sexual abuse, a charge that carries<\/a> the maximum<\/a> of three months in jail or one year\u2019s probation, plus a $500 fine. It was later found<\/a> that the prosecution was in possession of a recording from a sting operation, including the victim, where Weinstein had admitted he had committed the assault. Still, Vance declined to file the charges. Last week, the International Business Times<\/a> reported one major conflict of interest regarding the case: Weinstein\u2019s lawyer, David Boies, donated $10,000 to Vance in August 2015, four months after Vance declined to prosecute.<\/p>\n

The case is emblematic of Vance\u2019s time in the DA\u2019s office. Throughout his two terms \u2013 and he\u2019s likely to win re-election next month \u2013 Vance has shied away from prosecuting powerful people like Weinstein, even when the cases are solid, and he\u2019s chosen repeatedly to go after less- influential people when the cases are suspect or the crimes committed didn\u2019t hurt anyone. Beyond Vance\u2019s own office, however, it highlights a more pressing, systemic issue: there are two different justice systems for two different Americas.<\/p>\n

The Weinstein decision echoed another one made earlier in Vance\u2019s career as DA, a position he was elected to in 2009. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, was accused in 2011 of sexually assaulting a housekeeper at a hotel in Manhattan. Vance also declined to bring charges in that case. \u201cI look at the DSK case as a paragon,\u201d Vance told the New York Times in a 2013 interview<\/a>, \u201cbecause we absolutely believed this poor woman should be believed over this powerful man, and when additional facts came out, we were willing to show them to the defense.\u201d (Those \u201cadditional facts,\u201d as Colorlines<\/a><\/i> noted in 2011, didn\u2019t have anything to do with the accuser\u2019s account of her assault at the hands of Strauss-Kahn.)<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And then there are Trump kids:<\/p>\n

Apart from Vance\u2019s miserable failure at doing either of these things, Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. were, similarly to Weinstein, left untouched by Vance in 2012 even after Vance\u2019s major economic crimes division recommended that he should bring charges of felony fraud against them for \u201cmisleading prospective buyers of units in the Trump SoHo, a hotel and condo development.\u201d Less than six months later, ProPublica<\/a><\/i> reported, the Trumps\u2019 lawyer had donated and raised over $50,000 for Vance\u2019s re-election. It was only after the ProPublica story came out that Vance \u2014 who is running for re-election unopposed \u2014 returned the donation.<\/span> <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The most favorable interpretation is that Vance doesn’t want to prosecute rich people because they hire armies of lawyers, but that interpretation seems to be rather naive given the juxtaposition of campaign donations.<\/p>\n

I don’t think that this is an isolated incident.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cy Vance Represents Everything Wrong with the Justice System \u2014The Outline Of course, Paul Blest is referring to Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr., not his dad who was secretary of state. Vance is almost certainly going to be reelected next year, but it now appears that he let the rich and powerful skate in …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[513,368,407],"class_list":["post-179798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-campaign-finance","tag-corruption","tag-justice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179798"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179798"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179798\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}