In a rare move in New York, the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., last week asked a judge to charge a former prosecutor with perjury connected to a case he oversaw as an assistant U.S. attorney, according to people familiar with the situation.
Under investigation for months by the district attorney for his handling of a child sexual abuse case in 2011, the former A.U.S. prosecutor, Eric S. Adams, has not been charged, but Mr. Vance and Felix J. McHugh III, the district attorney’s chief of the investigations division, have argued that they believe they can make such a case.
If Mr. Adams, 37, is indicted, it would be almost unprecedented for Manhattan to charge one of its own.
Moreover, it could draw attention to the way in which elite prosecutors and their offices are not always held fully responsible when their work goes badly awry.
Mr. Adams left the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District last year to head the trial division at Mr. Vance’s office.
Since last May, prosecutors in Mr. Vance’s office have been investigating why prosecutors working under Mr. Adams in 2012 chose not to offer a sentence to an accused child molester, Pedro Hernandez, in exchange for his full confession to the brutal murder of a little girl, 6-year-old Etan Patz, in 1979.
The case led to the exoneration of the siblings, Jesse and Susan Patz, who were fingered by a witness as kidnappers and wrongly threatened with jail for a which-parent-loved-the-child-less charge for 35 years.
The decision not to offer a deal in that case, made without consent from Mr. Vance’s top bosses, has been the subject of reporting by The New York Times and by Dan Levin of NPR.
One possible explanation, according to prosecutors, was that Mr. Adams had personally vowed privately to a mother of another little boy that he would put away the man accused of mistreating her child, Juan X. Serrano, and that Mr. Adams did not want Mr. Serrano, who had been convicted in 2000 of killing a cousin in the Dominican Republic, to be given a possible life-saving deal connected to Mr. Hernandez’s murder confession.
In June 2011, Mr. Serrano’s nephew, 6-year-old Yonatan Aguilar, disappeared, and his uncle was arrested, charged and later convicted in July 2012. Mr. Serrano remains in prison awaiting his sentencing hearing in February for Yonatan’s murder.
Mr. Adams, now working on the Investigation Division at Mr. Vance’s office, has insisted that he removed himself from the Etan Patz case as soon as it became a political police scandal centered on the grand jury misconduct by the detectives who worked on it in early 2012, but prosecutors and aides to Mr. Vance now believe that that was not true and that he did so also because his interest in the Yonatan Aguilar case intermingled profoundly with his choices in the Patz case, particularly in regards to Mr. Serrano’s sentencing.
Prosecutors at Mr. Vance’s office have told him that he has violated the 2006 state civil rights statute by placing his interest in one investigation over another, in violation of that statute, according to officials familiar with the conversation.
The legislation was created specifically to prevent prosecutors from basing their work on the need to win victories over another. A subsidiary point was made, however. Should the other goal be to prosecute a child molester in one case, and another goal be to protect a convicted sex offender in a child’s death in another, then the state has its moral grounds to intervene.
Prosecutors for the Interstate Criminal Investigations section at the Manhattan district attorney’s office are now considering a charge of obstruction of justice, tampering to impede the course of justice and perjury against Mr. Adams.
No such action, which would involve a possible sentence of more than one year in state prison, has been taken and is expected to be made no later than on Monday, and possibly on Tuesday or Wednesday.
Prosecutors in the District Attorney’s office did not return a telephone call for comment on Thursday.
Mr. Adams did not return a telephone call or an email for comment on Thursday.
The evidence that investigators have against him is supporting the contention that he used his position to direct the course of justice, according to investigators and officials, but the charge itself is being worked out by an investigative team and could face legal difficulties in court.
The lawyers at the contending crimes for presenting evidence of wrongdoing are David Bronx and Christopher Slobogin.
The patent issue is the argument that Mr. Adams’s failure to disclose to Mr. Serrano a plea offer could at worst constitute a close call for perjury and/or battery, but that charge is likely to fail in court.
Pleading for the fact that Mr. Adams chose not to withdraw his offer would be a technicality, but if he was asked why, he would respond that his offer would protect Mr. Serrano from harsher sentences, and that is one of the drawbacks that could come out from under that shield and get him into such problems.
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