Dewey prosecution could have been handled better, DA says
Steven Davis arrives in handcuffs for the arraignment at Manhattan Criminal Court in March 2014. Photo by Reuters Carlo Allegri from the February 2015 ABA Journal.
The district attorney whose office prosecuted three former leaders of Dewey & LeBoeuf concedes the trial could have been handled better, but he says it’s unfair to draw conclusions about his white-collar prosecutions.
According to the New York Times, some wonder whether the office of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance “has made financial trials overly complex and has been too aggressive in pursuing matters that might best be treated as civil disputes.”
The mistrial in the Dewey & LeBoeuf case is one of several failed white-collar prosecutions, the article says. In one case, jurors acquitted two senior officers at Abacus Federal Savings Bank on mortgage fraud charges in June. In another, a judge tossed the conviction of a computer programmer accused of stealing computer code, saying the case didn’t fit the applicable law.
Vance says his office handles about 100,000 cases a year and it’s unfair to draw conclusions based on a couple cases. “If you look at two cases, it is like looking at crime statistics for the weekend,” Vance told the Times. “We are going to do tough cases, and some of those cases the jury is not going to agree with us. That is the reality of prosecution.”
Vance told the Times that if there is a retrial in the Dewey case, it will have to be “simpler and shorter.” The trial lasted four months and jurors deliberated for three weeks before a mistrial was declared.
Vance is expected to decide by Dec. 7 whether to retry the former Dewey leaders: chairman Steven Davis, executive director Stephen DiCarmine and chief financial officer Joel Sanders. They were accused of deceiving Dewey’s lenders and bond buyers about the law firm’s finances.
