Upstream. A Mohawk Valley Blogzine.

Friday, October 20, 2006

Trish Gets Trashed Again.

Yesterday, New York State’s highest court, The Court of Appeals, ruled that Robert Gorghan, will have to stand trial again in Rensselaer County on rape charges. Gorghan had argued that a second trial would constitute double jeopardy. While Gorghan lost his bid to quash a second trial, the ruling was as much a defeat for Rensselaer County DA Trish DeAngelis as it was for Gorghan. The Court called DeAngelis’s behavior in the first trial “deplorable.”

Chief Justice Judith Kaye begins the decision by stating, “In the context of this troubling case of a trial prosecutor’s misconduct...” and then goes on to state “... the prosecutor continuously flouted these and other rulings by attempting to place excluded evidence before the jury, repeatedly referencing matters not in evidence, making unsupportable assertions and calling upon the jury to draw improper inferences.”

Read the entire ruling.

Here’s another story about the Rensselaer DA’s office that as far as I know did not make the news, but it should have. I found it on Warren Redlich’s blog, and it shows once again why blogs are important.

It seems that due to incompetence on the part of the Rensselaer County DA’s office, a man spent 29 days in jail in Chicago for allegedly stealing from his employer in Rensselaer County. A few weeks ago, a Rensselaer County Grand Jury refused to indict the man, essentially believing he was innocent.

The old saw is that a grand jury can indict a ham sandwich. Redlich explains how easily it is for a grand jury to return an indictment. Alan Dershowitz says in his book Taking Liberties, that normally when a grand jury refuses to indict, it is because the prosecutor doesn’t want the person indicted. In this case, however, the Rensselaer County’s office did want this man indicted. Grand juries rarely go against what a prosecutor wants, so when the grand jury refused to indict Redlich’s client, they were essentially slapping DeAngelis in the face.

Reading between the lines of Redlich’s blog, I see a lawsuit coming up.

Read the original story on Redlich’s blog.

Read the follow-up story.

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