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This story was originally published on May 10 by The City, a nonprofit newsroom covering New York City.
Three years after a Gothamist series unearthed claims of false arrests and rampant police corruption in Mount Vernon, Westchester County District Attorney Mimi Rocah is asking the court system to dismiss 26 convictions, which her office has determined were tainted by discrepancies in police paperwork, as well as prosecutors’ failure to turn over key pieces of evidence to the accused.
That series, which relied on a police whistleblower’s secret recordings, played a major role in the ouster of Rocah’s predecessor, whose office failed to disclose the tapes to dozens of defendants it continued to prosecute, despite the fact that they contained explosive admissions and statements from officers who did not know they were being recorded.
Those statements included an account from an officer, who admitted to safeguarding crack for a drug dealer his team had allied with, and described his colleagues in the narcotics unit framing innocent people for drug sales. They also included a conversation in which another officer described standing by as her colleagues assaulted a resident and then arrested him on trumped-up drug charges.
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