NOTES FROM A FORMER POLITICAL PRISONER: THIRTY YEARS AGO, by John O’Hara

Thirty years ago in the 1992 Presidential election I registered to vote and voted. For that simple and solitary act I spent two decades in purgatory battling criminal charges, the past five years in Federal Courts on my malicious prosecution lawsuit. But if you think I have any regrets the answer is no. When a country starts locking people up for voting you have to draw a line and stand your ground. Liberty is not something that gets taken away from us all at once. It gets chipped away at slowly and slowly.

Count one, “filing a false instrument,” was the voter registration card, my address the Brooklyn District Attorney determined was false which was count two, and since I voted in the following five elections and primaries. These were all considered illegal votes which meant an additional five felony counts for a total of seven felony counts. I was facing 28 years in prison for voting.

I was the first person to be prosecuted for illegal voting in New York State since 1873. The defendant in that case was Susan B. Anthony. I also became the first person to be tried in Brooklyn three times on the same charge. At the first trial I was convicted, but it was reversed on appeal. The second trial was a hung jury and at the third trial I was convicted again. The penalty was 5 years of probation, $16,000 in fines, 1,500 hours of community service, and I was disbarred from the practice of law.

There were a dozen appeals, months turned into years and years turned into decades. When you have been wrongly convicted you become consumed with your own vindication. But what I really focused on was running candidates for Brooklyn District Attorney, which happens every four years. Finally in 2013 Charles Hynes became the first District Attorney to be defeated in New York City in over one hundred years. Three years after that, in 2017 the new District Attorney, Eric Gonzalez, overturned my conviction.

An investigation by the new District Attorney revealed that the State Assemblyman I ran against 30 years earlier, Jim Brennan, and his clubhouse lawyer, Jack Carroll, instigated the prosecution and acted as the DA’s secret investigators. My real crime was that I ran for office and lost.

But the political influence didn’t just extend to former District Attorney Hynes. Judges were also spoken to. You see nobody ever got wrongfully convicted in a Court Room by accident. That’s just not how it happens. A prosecutor decides who is guilty and then figures out a way to prove it. And when a prosecutor’s misconduct is exposed, they face no consequences. So much for the cliché “nobody is above the law.”  There are no checks and balances in place to combat these abuses. Prosecutors control what goes on in the Courts while the Judges just direct the traffic.

But it hasn’t been all bad and some good things came out of this. I spent years working on getting District Attorney Hynes out of office and after he was ousted in 2013 the new DA overturned over 30 convictions of people wrongfully convicted. Bad prosecutors in the office were fired, and, I didn’t have to wait for my funeral to find out who my friends really are. What I want is for people to embrace the political process. Politics can be the great equalizer and if it wasn’t for the fact that we elect our District Attorneys I’d still be a convicted felon today.

John O’Hara is an attorney and subscriber to The Red Hook Star Revue. He lives in Brooklyn.

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