Brooklyn Law School faculty members and co-directors of the school’s Center for Criminal Justice wrote the following letter in protest.
As New Yorkers, we are opposed to Governor Hochul’s nomination of Judge Hector LaSalle to our state’s highest court. His judicial track record on the rights of tenants, workers and people seeking reproductive healthcare is troubling. But as law professors, who teach and write about criminal law and procedure, we are especially concerned with what Judge LaSalle’s judicial record says about his clear disregard for constitutional rights, legal ethics and transparency in the criminal legal system.
At Brooklyn Law School, we co-direct the Center for Criminal Justice, which focuses, among other things, on exposing law students to the realities of the complex criminal adjudication system. Many of our students go on to work in this system upon graduation. Judge LaSalle’s record on ethics and his lack of transparency disqualifies him from leading our courts. It is the very approach we caution our students against. Our concern, to be clear, is not that LaSalle is a former prosecutor. Instead, the problem is that Judge LaSalle has shown his allegiance to the notion of unchecked prosecutorial power. Judge LaSalle’s conduct has enabled public officials to escape accountability. He is willing to tolerate and shield rampant daily bureaucratic violence against the most vulnerable New Yorkers.
We are specifically troubled by Judge LaSalle’s lack of sound leadership when it comes to accountability for prosecutors. LaSalle is the presiding justice of the New York Supreme Court’s Second Judicial Department. As such, he was a named defendant in a recent federal lawsuit regarding the need for transparency over prosecutor misconduct. In 2021, law professors, along with advocates from the Civil Rights Corps, undertook an effort to hold New York City prosecutors accountable for proven, documented misconduct. One of our colleagues, Professor Cynthia Godsoe, was part of this joined effort, called Accountability NY. The group filed dozens of bar complaints against prosecutors. Many of the complaints were based on decisions from appellate judges—LaSalle’s colleagues and peers—who found that prosecutors had unlawfully withheld exculpatory evidence, elicited false testimony, and made misleading and/or unfair statements to juries during trials. This effort was important and laudable given New York’s long history of unaddressed prosecutorial misconduct. In an effort to encourage transparency, the professors posted these complaints online.
The blowback was swift. In a letter to the Grievance Committee, the legal profession’s disciplinary body, New York City claimed that the professors had abused and politicized the complaints process. In response, the professors sued and won a significant victory in federal court, securing their right to publish both the complaints and the threatening letter from the City. Instead of supporting the professors’ efforts to bring transparency and accountability to the grave injustices prosecutors were committing in our courts, Judge LaSalle asked the federal court to keep the City’s threatening letter sealed.
In their lawsuit, the professors alleged that, “[p]rosecutorial misconduct can have devastating consequences; it can cause the imprisonment of innocent people.” The complaint cited a 2020 study showing that prosecutorial misconduct occurred in 30% of more than 2,000 exonerations. Yet, in Judge LaSalle’s reply to the court, he responded to this specific statement by “deny[ing] knowledge or information sufficient to form a belief as to the truth of the allegations.” It is striking that LaSalle, who has over 13 years of judicial experience and over 10 years of prosecutorial experience, used boilerplate language to deny awareness that prosecutorial misconduct can lead to a faulty legal process and the incarceration of innocent people.
Judge LaSalle’s judicial opinions worry us, too. For example, in cases like People v. Corbin, Judge LaSalle demonstrated a lack of concern for the rights of people charged with crimes, especially when it comes to the court’s ability to review unconstitutional police conduct. In Corbin, Judge LaSalle joined an opinion that prevented the litigant from challenging a potentially unconstitutional search of his car. This was despite the fact that during the defendant’s plea proceeding, the trial judge informed the defendant that he would still be able to appeal “certain constitutional issues.” However, Judge LaSalle and his colleagues refused to allow the man to pursue his potentially meritorious appeal. This is a kind of analysis that the Court of Appeals repudiated in a later case. And yet it demonstrates Judge LaSalle’s cavalier attitude toward basic constitutional rights; an attitude that we caution our students against.
Judge LaSalle’s disregard for constitutional rights was present in another troubling case, People v. Bridgeforth, which concerned racial discrimination against potential jurors. In 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Batson v. Kentucky that parties cannot rely on race when selecting jurors for criminal trials. Yet, in Bridgeforth, Judge LaSalle joined an opinion holding that removing potential jurors because of their “dark-colored” skin was not enough to support a Batson claim. The Bridgeforth opinion ignored the possibility of discrimination based on skin color. Appropriately, the N.Y. Court of Appeals unanimously overturned the decision two years later. As the Court wrote, racial discrimination in jury selection “not only violates our Constitution and the laws enacted under it but [it] is at war with our basic concepts of a democratic society and a representative government.” Anyone who cares about constitutional protections against racial discrimination should be worried about Judge LaSalle joining this very same Court of Appeals.
We are under no illusion that the New York State Court of Appeals can fix a criminal system that we believe to be profoundly, if not irrevocably, unjust. In addition to being law professors, each of us has worked, and continues to work, within this system, standing alongside people arrested, prosecuted and punished. As such, it is imperative that judges on our state’s highest court display integrity and respect for the minimal rights and ethical rules that offer some protection against unchecked power and devastating harm. There are other candidates who display these qualities, such as Judge Edwina Richardson-Mendelson, Professor Abbe Gluck or Corey Stoughton, each of whom would also bring a diversity of experience to the court. New Yorkers need a judge who will promote transparency and fairness, and strive for an ethical practice of law. LaSalle is not that person; he is unfit to lead our state court system.
The authors are co-directors of the Center for Criminal Justice at Brooklyn Law School. Alexis Hoag-Fordjour is an assistant professor; Kate Mogulescu is a professor of clinical law; and Jocelyn Simonson is a professor.