A Private Investigator Wanted to Prove His Clients Innocent. Will His Methods Be His Own Undoing?

I found it particularly telling that Terrell made 62 arrests a year when NYC police were expected to make between 12 and 24.

This story points out the need for criminal justice reform, which takes significant resources. The criminal justice system is not well-served by having angry, vindictive & discredited people like Gomez conducting “investigations” to exonerate defendants...the “investigators” have ulterior motives...discredit law enforcement to bolster their own dubious credibility. Legislators, law enforcement, defense advocates, prosecutors & other stakeholders must come together to provide a system that is accountable, fair, just & which has the resources to do the jobs we expect & need them to do competently. That includes alternatives to cash bail for non-violent crimes & diversion programs that focus on treatment for offenders. Work on adequately funding & fixing the system and people like Gomez won’t be able to use that system to benefit themselves. All stakeholders must ultimately come to trust each other if the criminal justice system is to work for everyone & survive...and that will take creativity, trust & lots of financial & human resources. There is no place in law enforcement for “bad” cops or vigilante cops or vindictive ex-cops. The problems in NYC will be difficult to overcome just because of the volume, but good people & public will can make it happen. New York needs to legislate changes in how discovery, evidence in cases, is provided to the defense. No one should plead to charges without knowing the evidence against them & I say that as a retired prosecutor.

From a meta perspective this is a story from the larger context of mass incarceration a la The New Jim Crow, and the excellent documentary on Netflix, "13th." Mr Knafo's failure to put Gomez's story in that context does Times readers a disservice. I appreciate the many reader comments that lead us in that direction. The ends never justify the means and Gomez is imperfect, but the effects of a flawed justice system are devastating to young black and brown across the nation and have continued for decades.

Subtle, clever writing—bravo! “[A] number of current and former members of the N.Y.P.D.... contend that the department pressures officers to meet arrest quotas in low-income black and brown communities.... (The department has long denied this practice and in recent years has vowed to sanction supervisors who continue to enforce quotas.)” In other words, the NYPD keeps insisting its supervisors don’t do this and when they keep doing it we punish them.

Quoting the article: “Gomez had introduced Hernandez…to the lawyers…who had agreed to file lawsuits on their behalf. If the city settled these lawsuits, Gomez says, he’d be paid his fee….” “Stephen Gillers, an expert in legal ethics at N.Y.U. Law School, told me that such arrangements weren’t necessarily unethical, but they weren’t advisable either. If an investigator has a financial stake in a lawsuit, he could be tempted to distort the truth.” Mr. Gillers should find another line of work before his clients wind up in jail: NYS, Article 7, General Business Law (Private Investigators) §84. Unlawful acts: ”It is unlawful for the holder of a license to furnish or perform any services described in subdivisions 1 and 2 of §71 of this article on a contingent or percentage basis or to make or enter into any agreement for furnishing services of any kind or character, by the terms or conditions of which agreement the compensation to be paid for such services to the holder of a license is partially or wholly contingent or based upon a percentage of the amount of money or property recovered or dependent in any way upon the result achieved….”

A flawed man fighting a very flawed system! I am going to pick the underdog because the City has proved it has no scruples when it comes to a just system so fighting fire with fire works for me.

Require detectives to wear body cameras that are actively recording every moment that they are on the job. Then allow the defendants to review all videos regarding their case. This may help defendants claims of wrongful prosecution.

Manuel Gomez is a much-needed modern day Robin Hood. His professional background and credentials should have been more emphasized in the article. I was very disappointed that there was virtually nothing written about the Department of Civilian Justice bill that he developed and introduced. This is a crucial part of his work and efforts that needed to be explained to the public. We need more Manny Gomez's to protect marginalized people who typically have little or no voice in our criminal justice system

If your goal is justice, the ends never justify injustice.

I have a bunch of uncles and cousins in the NYPD. I think they generally try to do the right thing, to "Protect and Serve" within the framework of the job. But the job, the department, the whole apparatus, is fatally flawed. "The police, who investigate crime, and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders," as the hagiography goes, are incentivized to execute as many arrests and convictions as they possibly can. Through bias and pragmatism (much more likely a white kid in NYC is gonna turn around with a pricey lawyer to end your career), this falls on poor people of color. It's baked in. And there are thousands of cops and prosecutors who employ "any means necessary" to these ends. So if Manny Gomez uses flexible means to try to actually enforce the principle of "innocent until proven guilty," more power to him. The problem is that the powerful forces he is up against are going to grind him to pulp. The whole system needs a good flush, and maybe some cops and prosecutors in prison.

Too true that, "For defendants who can’t afford bail, just getting out of jail can be reason enough to take a plea.". I'm a criminal defense attorney in a small town and this STILL holds true. Worse is child "services" extorting a mother with, "We'll give you your child back IF you admit you were negligent and agree to our supervision. Things like this may happen every day in your community

“In the lawsuit, which a number of defendants have successfully filed to be dismissed from, he argued that the Police Department had abandoned him, by failing to defend him in part because of his race, and he accused the city of encouraging people to bring frivolous litigation against the police without properly investigating their claims.” So similar to Cops arresting poor and disenfranchised youth on weak or minimal evidence to then see them sit at Riker’s because they can’t afford bail? Give me a break.

With the classification of this part of The Bronx as "...the poorest congressional district in the country..." and the tale told of police corruption against gang violence and the people who may end up trying to live out personal vendettas against wrongs in their own lives by "sticking it to the man," as a crusade of sorts; one is left with the conclusion that the only real solution is to keep throwing money at it. But how much can one do, really? And where will said money come from? Other parts of NY State, whilst not as dire as this section of the Bronx aren't exactly flush with money to spare. And getting people from elsewhere who aren't living there to support the greater good? Good luck with that. I also admit amazement that this district ranks even lower than Appalachia or the more forgotten parts of the deep South as far as poverty goes. Ironic, given the proximity to wealth in nearby Counties and adjacent areas. A lot of issues, good questions, but few easy answers.

I worked in the South Bronx for years and it is littered with stories like Hernandez's. These stories are common because everyone it seems that could care simply shrugs and does not, including the media. The fact is, the neighborhoods have been abandoned literally and figuratively for years, by landlords, politicians, and many others who could have cared. Landlords were burning down their buildings in the 70s - if it weren't for community groups, entire swaths of the Bronx would be vacant, rubble-filled lots. The State Assembly voted literally in the middle to give the Yankees over 20 acres of parkland for their new stadium, crumbs were thrown to the communities near the stadium of one of the richest corporations in America. I note that the Times wrote virtually nothing about this deal until it had been sealed up and delivered; compare that to the renovation of Washington Square Park where the height of the fences was debated ad nauseum for months. The whole system is a failure in large parts of the Bronx; it is not the fault of the residents. It's the fault of the city and state which cares not a whit for the people who live there.

NYC has a bad reputation for corruption of all kinds including police, unions, politicians and other city employees. Sometimes disasters reveal those common malfeasances. The deaths of firefighters at a building being removed near ground zero, the toppling of construction cranes, the crash of ferries, the hugely expensive 2nd Ave subway constuction, etc. Maybe the days when cops collected their envelopes are over but who knows. The worst facts in this incomplete story are the lack of resources to fight crime in the South Bronx. and to run a proper criminal court system. In such a wealthy city, it’s hard to excuse this.

This seems like a story of men with big egos playing with others' lives. Or put another way, life in the big city.

If everyone brought up on charges simply demanded a trial the system would collapse under its own weight.

Bail reform. The solution to jail for unconvincted minor offenses. NY needs it desperately.

Because money is more important than people, in the USA!

It is an old story in NY: there are some very tough criminals, including juveniles, and cynical or corrupt cops who take shortcuts to "get" those they've labeled as the worst - not necessarily related to evidence. Maybe A brother in jail for murder? Add an overwhelmed Court system, with long - and hazardous -pre trial ( or plea) incarceration which serves to harden those arrested further. The Gomez story would make a good movie - or series.It doesn't give us clues about how to stop this conveyer belt. Reform? Is it possible? Can't we do better? Or have we mostly abandoned such tough areas as dangerous ones where we luckier folk neither have to live or work?

Came to the South Bronx in 1981 as a guest of the Vera Institute of Justice. We were working on community service sentencing reform ideas and I was doing some research on the program the Institute had implemented there for minor offenders to make symbolic restitution. I was running a similar program in Portland. The thing I learned during my 7 days there was that a minor offender in the South Bronx was a completely different animal than in PDX. Culture shock. Mean streets kind of sums it up. I felt like I was in some kind of cop, court, offender war....all framed by the deserted buildings and and bleak piles of rubble. How any professional integrity survived was always a mystery.

These cops/ex-cops strike me as fitting into a certain cop archetype I’ve encountered before in multiple counties - the “justice and security at any cost” type. These cops think of themselves as tough, bend the rules, and sometimes lie or plant evidence (or commit other more serious crimes, which I’ve witnessed in other counties...). To them, the law is not what brings justice, but a tool that can be used to keep “good people” safe from “bad people.” Ignoring the broader societal effects of this mentality, I think this is a horribly ineffective way to make America safer for law abiding citizens which is too often rewarded by negligent or incompetent management. When these cops interact with people, they assess their personality and place them in one of two camps - “good” or “bad” - and then hold onto those labels with convictions. Once they believe they’ve found the “bad” guy, or guilty party, no amount of exculpatory evidence can convince them otherwise. In their mind? the details of the truth of a case are immaterial so long as the version shown in court puts the “bad guy” away for a long time. This putting of the truth on the sidelines means the guilty people often go free, while innocent people may be jailed simply for having rough pasts. It’s noble to want to keep the most dangerous neighborhoods safe, and I don’t know what tactics are required in neighborhoods where witnesses often don’t come forward or are unreliable, but this mentality does not work.

Gomez appears to have many faults. But the real story here is a system that crams 250,000 arrests/yr through the city courts. The guaranteed results are the trashing of the constitutional right to a speedy trial and frequent guilty pleas by innocent people. This is tragic and embarrassing for NYC.

Yikes. So many reforms are needed -- all of this is shocking. Excellent comments serving as footnotes. Someone makes $$ whenever someone is in jail -- and why are they not better run? (and my own personal gripe is the horrible quality of food served wherever people are "incarcerated" - schools, hospitals, nursing homes IMO a national travesty.

One of the obvious problems is that the prosecutor is allowed to withhold evidence until the eve of trial, as is also true in the federal criminal system. It is a mystery why civil lawsuits, involving money, have generous discovery rules, including the right to depose witnesses under oath, while criminal cases, where liberty is at stake, play hide the evidence.

This Good/Bad hall of mirrors will only get worse as social media continues to saturate the country. Utilized as a weapon in the justice system, social media facilitates the most base impulses at the expense of a terrible scarring of the innocent; but even the guilty are invariably treated in such a way that their lives are forever tainted and 'rehabilitation' ends up looking more and more like public debasement. Categorical thinking--the forte of social media and politics--wipes out the reality of the subjectivity of the suspected individual and makes of him or her mere pawns in ambiguous power struggles. The guilt is shared all around in the good/evil hall of mirrors because the system is compromised by the diffusion of checks and balances on raw power as a consequence of deferred maintenance. As usual, absent public money well spent, the poor are silenced and rendered ever more susceptible to taking a chance on the first unvetted Lone Ranger who rides into town. But what else can the vulnerable or even the sly do? As a strategy, doing 'right' in the traditional sense too often puts the individual in harms way, if only because we've made justice a life and death gamble for the poor. On the other hand, doing right for the rich and connected amounts to renouncing the game of stacking the cards. Same old story x10 in the advanced technological world of America and so much harder to fix, should other Lone Rangers be so motivated and possessed of the rare capacity to do so.

At this, the most popular level of the criminal justice system in New York and I suspect elsewhere, there is no good there is no evil; there is no right there is no wrong. It is a cesspool of actions and reactions, accusations and defenses, black vs white, grudges and retribution, vengeance, personal interests, histories, exaggerations, "favors" and complicity. And it will never change.

"If the city settled these lawsuits, Gomez says, he’d be paid his fee....Stephen Gillers, an expert in legal ethics at N.Y.U. Law School, told me that such arrangements weren’t necessarily unethical, but they weren’t advisable either. If an investigator has a financial stake in a lawsuit, he could be tempted to distort the truth." Yet every attorney working a civil suit for a contingency fee (of what, 40 percent?) is doing exactly that. Gee, I wonder if they are tempted to "distort the truth"?

The critical issue if NYC's failure to staff the courts to meet the constitutional rights of defendants for a fair and just hearing and trial. Providing only resources to hear 650 cases in the courts when the police arrest 250,000 appears to have created a rigged system, where once again the rich win and the poor lose.

I'm a former prosecutor and a practicing criminal defense attorney. There are bottom feeders in the criminal justice system as there in banking and medicine and sports. However that the Judge Holder (if he in fact did) berated Gomez for determining his client to be innocent without reading the extensive discovery that's nonsense. Everyone is presumed innocent until convicted beyond a reasonable doubt by a jury or by making a knowing and voluntary plea of guilt. Given the crush of cases many judges and prosecutors form decisions as to guilt just by reading documents. A defense attorney under our Constitution is obligated to do far more than just read documents be convinced of their clients guilt and send them off to prison. An "investigator" is obligated to investigate. If all they did was read the very documents you had why bother hiring them? I dont believe in grandstanding as a defense but I cant fault an investigator for investigating. All the Queens case shows is that a witness gave a prior inconsistent statement. Thats about as common as peas with rice.

I did a police ride along once and learned how tough the police have it; there are obviously bad ones but what I saw were cops who really wanted to do a good job and were despised by the public. I highly recommend every citizen do this to learn about the reality of police work. Seems to me based on this article that Gomez should never have been allowed to wear the uniform.