Thompson elected first black Brooklyn DA

By ANDREA AUSTIN, DEANNE STEWART, ALEX ELLEFSON and LAUREN KEATING

Ken Thompson became Brooklyn’s new district attorney on Tuesday night, defeating six-term incumbent Charles Hynes by a wide margin.

With 60 percent of the votes counted, Thompson had 72 percent of the vote to 27 percent for Hynes. Thompson will be the first black district attorney of Brooklyn and only the second in state history.

“The people of Brooklyn have voted for a man who started out with the odds stacked against him as a child and made that man the district attorney of Brooklyn,” Thompson said in his victory speech.

After initially withdrawing from the race following a 10-point loss to Thompson in the Sept. 10 Democratic primary, Hynes decided to run on the Republican and Conservative lines.

Ending a bitter campaign, Hynes conceded defeat at his campaign headquarters in a Bay Ridge restaurant. “It’s a substantial vote,” he said of his opponent’s margin of victory. “It gives Ken Thompson a clear mandate which he didn’t have after the primary.” He added: “I’m surprised it was so wide.”

Hynes said he had mixed feelings about running for district attorney again until he found out that convicted former Brooklyn Democratic leader Clarence Norman – “who I put in prison” — was rumored to have played a role in Thompson’s campaign. Norman, a former assemblyman, was sentenced in 2007 to three-to nine-years in prison for extorting money from candidates for judgeships.

Thompson denied the charge that Norman was active in his campaign, but Hynes made it the centerpiece of his re-election drive.
“I will do everything in my power to make damn sure that Clarence Norman, Jr. never influences the Office of Brooklyn District Attorney,” Hynes said during a news conference at Brooklyn Borough Hall.

Thompson responded that Hynes’s allegation about Norman was “an outright lie,” saying he had nothing to do with his campaign. “It’s a desperation move by D.A. Hynes,” he said.

Thompson accused Hynes of doing little about wrongful convictions – pointing to a lawsuit aimed at actions of Hynes’s top deputy, Michael Vecchione, over the conviction of Jabbar Collins, who was released from prison after serving 15 years for a murder he says he didn’t commit. Hynes is scheduled to testify in November in a $150 million lawsuit filed by Collins.

In an ad for Thompson’s campaign, actor Holt McCallany said, “Charles Hynes has been in office for almost 24 years and his tenure has been plagued by incompetence, corruption, prosecutorial misconduct, and abuse of power.”

Hynes repeatedly accused Thompson of not being qualified enough to manage the district attorney’s office. He likened Thompson’s campaign to a Seinfeld episode, saying, “It’s a campaign about nothing because he has no experience.”

Thompson, who served five years as a federal prosecutor, helped convict a police officer in the 1997 attack on Abner Louima, one of New York’s most notorious police brutality cases. He is largely known for representing a hotel housekeeper who alleged that she was sexually assaulted by the head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Some say that Thompson handled the case to gain publicity.

Over the last 10 years, Thompson has run his own private firm with one other partner and 15 employees. Though he has criminal justice experience, Hynes supporters argue that he doesn’t have the supervisory experience that the district attorney of such a large borough needs.

Only about 20 percent of Democrats voted in the primary election. This small turnout is one of the factors that led Hynes to say that if he could gain the support of Republicans and some Democrats who didn’t vote, he could have a real chance at winning. Hynes has spent a lot of time campaigning in Bay Ridge, where Republicans are influential, and politically moderate areas of southern Brooklyn.

After losing in the primary, many of Hynes’s biggest past supporters endorsed Thompson, roshe run femmes including ultra-Orthodox Jewish Satmar sects, Frank R. Seddio, chairman of the Brooklyn Democratic organization, Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, Hynes’s former spokesperson George Arzt and City Council member Letitia James, the Democratic candidate for public advocate. Thompson also has strong support from Democratic mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, and was endorsed by The New York Times.

However, Hynes has been praised as a law enforcement innovator. “He’s the first one to give victims of domestic violence a beeper,” said David Schwartz, who served as an assistant district attorney of Kings County from 1993 through 1997 and is a supporter of Hynes’s campaign. “He’s one of the first ones to have a gang unit, his drug treatment programs are copied throughout the country, his return to the system programs; he’s one of the innovators of bringing defendants back into the system, into society. He understands the recidivism rate. He has programs that actually help people come back into society and live a lawful life.”

Thompson said he would focus on keeping guns off the streets, take a closer look at stop-and-frisk arrests, and push for less arrests for small amounts of marijuana.

Referring to his win, Thompson said, “The duty of a prosecutor is not to convict. The ultimate duty is of a prosecutor is to do justice.”