Despite the scores of wrongful convictions exposed by defense lawyers, district attorneys and judges in New York City over the past decade, only a handful of people have been directly named as the culprits of the wrongdoing. District attorneys like to place blame on bad cops, who then point the finger at the DA’s underlings. 

Although the group has sparked controversy over the last few years, Accountability NY thus far has been unsuccessful in getting the state’s oversight body to take action against the trial prosecutors who handled the faulty convictions. The group’s targets include Mark Hale, a powerful figure in the Brooklyn DA’s office until his recent retirement. 

In October 2021, a team of lawyers assembled by Bina Ahmad of the Civil Rights Corps, a national organization that supports Accountability NY, filed a grievance complaint against Hale. The committee, which is housed in the state’s Appellate Division, promptly acknowledged receipt of the complaint. 

Through the end of 2023, that boilerplate initial response remains the only update that Ahmad’s group has received. In addition to Ahmad, a former NY Legal Aid public defender, the distinguished team includes Russell Neufeld, Mitchell Dinnerstein and Tim Rountree, each of whom fought death penalty cases during the 1990s. Rountree also directs Legal Aid’s Queens office. 

Although non-response has been the pattern with most of the 45 other grievance filings by Accountability NY, Hale’s status differentiates him from his peers. Unlike many of the grievance targets, he is not simply a former prosecutor who won a flawed conviction then moved on to private practice in criminal defense. 

As Ahmad and company state at the outset of their 23-page grievance letter (replete with nearly 150 footnotes), from 2014 through mid-2021 Hale helmed Brooklyn’s Conviction Review Unit. “Shockingly,” the letter states, Hale “was himself found to have committed prosecutorial misconduct during his earlier career as a homicide prosecutor.” 

A few months after the grievance filing, Hale testified in a post-conviction hearing in the case of Anthony Sims. Hale explained that after joining the Brooklyn DA’s office in 1983, he handled “north of 150 cases,” mostly homicides. In their letter, Ahmad and company focused on three.

During the 1993 trial of Emmanuel Cooper, Hale falsely told the jury that a key witness was not under arrest when he gave an incriminating statement against Cooper at the police precinct. In fact, the witness had been charged in a drive-by shooting. 

In 2020, Brooklyn Judge Ruth Shillingford ordered a new trial for Cooper, who had been incarcerated for 27 years. Later that year, DA Eric Gonzalez’s office opted not to retry him, in the process revealing an undisclosed recorded statement from an eyewitness who told police that the shooter was someone he knew by name. Last year, Cooper agreed to a $10 million settlement of his federal lawsuit versus the city. 

Five years after Cooper’s conviction, a Brooklyn judge stated that Hale’s misconduct was “truly egregious” in the trial of Vladymir Campos. Most glaringly, Hale initially told the court that he was not aware that a lie-detector test had been given to a key witness who had changed his initial account. Two days later, Hale admitted that he spoke to the polygraph examiner and helped formulate the questions on the test. 

During the late 1990s–early 2000s, Hale handled death penalty cases brought by Brooklyn DA Joe Hynes. Although he potentially could have gone to death row, Campos instead received a 25 year–life sentence and is now out on parole. 

In his 2005 prosecution of Garnell Thompson, Hale withheld the names of potential exculpatory witnesses until the outset of the trial, curtailing the ability of Thompson’s attorney to track them down. An appellate panel ruled that the witnesses were not “material” (i.e. relevant), a fact still disputed by Thompson, who is not eligible for parole until 2029. 

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None of Hale’s actions appear to have alarmed the grievance committee, which has not even updated Ahmad’s team regarding any actions it has taken (including whether it has closed the case). The committee has thus “created internal guidelines that eviscerate the plain meaning of being a complainant,” says Russell Neufeld. The result, he adds, is “to be as little transparent as possible in order to continue the committee’s practice of not disciplining prosecutor misconduct.” 

The Indypendents’s inquiry regarding the status of the Hale complaint yielded no answers. The committee is not alone in excusing misconduct, however. 

As noted above, Hale handled the questionable conviction of Anthony Sims, whose post-conviction hearing commenced at the same time that Ahmad’s group filed its grievance letter. Hale’s dubious actions here included not correcting the record when the prosecution’s main witness, Julius Graves, lied at the trial, and not informing the jury that Graves had received considerable financial support from the DA’s office in exchange for testifying. 

When Hale took the stand in Sims’ hearing in late February 2022, he petulantly denied any recollection of the case. As The Indy explained, there was no dispute that both Sims and Graves were at the 1998 crime scene, a Chinese food joint in Bushwick — instead the case boils down to which one of the two is credible.  

Hale’s bout of amnesia on the stand at one point perplexed Brooklyn Judge Danny Chun. “I don’t think it was an everyday occurrence,” Chun said to Hale, “where a Chinese employee gets shot and killed in a Chinese restaurant back in those days. But the fact that the victim was killed by a shotgun does not help you to recall [the case] at all?” 

“It does not, your Honor,” Hale replied. 

In his ruling that upheld Sims’ conviction, Chun opted not to address Hale’s veracity. Sims is now out on parole, and the appellate division will either uphold or overturn his conviction later this year. 

Whether Hale or the 45 other prosecutors spotlighted by Accountability NY will suffer any repercussions for their misconduct remains an open question.

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