On Tuesday, the perjury case that was being tried against a former narcotics detective for the city of New York was dismissed in the middle of the trial when the prosecution admitted that they had failed to turn over evidence to the defendant’s defence team as required.
The office of the Manhattan District Attorney also announced that the prosecutor who handled the case would be demoted. The case involved allegations that former investigator Joseph Franco had lied about observing cocaine exchanges.
Since of the accusations, hundreds of narcotics cases that he had worked on over the past five years have been dropped because the prosecutor’s office has disavowed them.
“It is imperative that the people of New York are aware that all members of law enforcement, including prosecutors, are conducting themselves with the utmost integrity.
That is the standard to which we hold ourselves accountable “Doug Cohen, a spokesperson for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, said so in a statement.
According to what was said, the dissemination of evidence in the case “violated our discovery requirements.”
Discovery is a legal word that refers to the sharing of documents and other types of data between the prosecuting attorney’s office and the defence attorney’s office so that the defence attorney can prepare their client’s answer.
Due to the fact that the case was dismissed, the statement did not provide any specifics regarding the material that had been improperly withheld. Howard Tanner, who represents Franco, has been contacted with a request for comment on the matter.
He made statements to the local media in which he claimed that the District Attorney’s office had “repeatedly withheld and destroyed evidence, misrepresented on the record, and other ethical infractions.””
“But how is it possible for him to regain his reputation?” asked Tanner, who said that his client had a distinguished 20-year police career during which he had never committed any wrongdoing. After his indictment the year before, it resulted in his termination in the year 2020.
During the course of the trial, the prosecution presented video evidence that they claimed refuted Franco’s assertions that he had on multiple times witnessed unlawful drug deals.
Tanner stated that the former detective may have messed up certain geographical facts but wasn’t intentionally dishonest and was telling the truth “on trial for simply performing his duties.”
On Tuesday, at Tanner’s request and with the permission of the prosecution, the charges were dropped by the judge.
Although the allegations only included a few cases, they prompted prosecutors in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx to overturn a combined total of hundreds of other convictions in cases involving Franco.
The prosecutors did not state that they had discovered proof of alleged perjury in those cases; however, they did claim that they were unable to support his work.
The district attorney’s office in Manhattan stated that it was continuing to investigate Franco’s cases. The District Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn declined to comment; a message was forwarded to prosecutors in the Bronx.
NYC Trial Kicks Off For Ex-NYPD Detective Charged With Perjury
A disgraced former NYPD detective is scheduled to go on trial for allegedly framing innocent individuals in Manhattan on Wednesday. The former detective is accused of lying, which is believed to have led to the dismissal of hundreds of cases.
Joseph Franco, a former narcotics officer for the New York Police Department who was fired in May 2020 following a departmental trial, is facing multiple counts of perjury and misconduct charges.
After allegations surfaced in 2019 that a veteran ex-cop who had spent almost 20 years on the job had framed more than 400 New Yorkers, their convictions were overturned across the city.
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Prosecutors in Manhattan have filed a motion to overturn 107 convictions that are connected to Franco. When Franco was working as a plainclothes investigator for Narcotics Borough Manhattan South between February 2017 and April 2018, they intend to
concentrate their investigation on four instances that are allegedly connected to the purchase of drugs during that time period. According to what they claim, Franco’s account of the events stands in stark contrast with the video footage.
People who pleaded guilty to charges they were innocent of in order to avoid a longer prison sentence will be the primary focus of the prosecutor’s office. When the authorities finally linked the dots, two of them were already doing time in jail, as the court documents show.
The accusations of perjury against Franco pertain to his testimony given under oath in front of grand juries that heard evidence in the various instances.
Several legal actions have been taken against Franco in recent years.
Sterling Medine filed a lawsuit against Franco in the Supreme Court of the Bronx in March of this year, accusing Franco of destroying his livelihood by making false accusations that he sold drugs during an undercover operation outside of his store.
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In 2013, Medine entered a guilty plea to the charge of unlawfully selling a prohibited drug. As a result of the investigation of Franco’s arrests that took place in 2021, his conviction was reversed.
In April of 2021, prosecutors in Brooklyn made a request to the judges to overturn 90 narcotics convictions in which Franco played a significant role as a witness.
One of them, Raliek Skinner, who was 35 at the time, was one of those whose convictions were dismissed after it came to light that Franco’s arrest of him in 2010 was based on fake claims. Raliek Skinner was one of those individuals.
Franco’s notoriety for harassing neighbourhood residents in the area of Gowanus where he lived earned him the label “Mean Guy,” according to a statement that Skinner made to the Daily News the previous year.
Franco has entered a not guilty plea to all of the allegations against him. A phone call to his attorney seeking comment was not returned.
