Prosecutors in New York City are resigning in droves due to “soft-on-crime” policies set by woke city officials and aggressive reforms imposed by the state, the New York Post reported.
The resignations began increasing sharply in January when Mayor Eric Adams (D) was sworn into office and several progressive district attorneys started their terms.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office has had 65 assistant district attorneys resign – around 12 percent of its total staff – since January, the Post reported. By March of this year, 44 assistant district attorneys had resigned, while only 97 quit throughout the entire year of 2021.
It is not just the Manhattan borough that is seeing prosecutors leave en masse; the same trend is apparent in Brooklyn and the Bronx.
The Brooklyn district attorney’s office has seen 67 prosecutors resign this year – about 13 percent of its total staff – while 94 prosecutors quit all of last year. In the Bronx, 59 prosecutors walked away from the borough’s office between January and May.
As Breitbart News reported in January, the Soros-backed Bragg released a memo that instructed his staff to “not seek pre-trial detention or prison sentences for crimes other than homicide, public corruption, and a few other exceptional cases.”
Two weeks after the memo was released, around nine lawyers in Bragg’s office decided to call it quits, the Post reported at the time.
While many assistant district attorneys left due to Bragg’s woke agenda, the Post noted that aggressive “criminal justice” reforms from the state are prompting assistant district attorneys and other staffers to resign their positions.
One such policy, which the state implemented in 2019, is commonly known as “speedy trial” reform, which requires prosecutors to turn in all evidence pertaining to a given case in a short period of time.
Former Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Joan Illuzzi-Orbon told the Post that the state’s policy is “insanity.”
“You become a file clerk rather than a trial lawyer,” Illuzzi-Orbon said. “Most of it is completely irrelevant and not germane in any way to the issues of the case.”
As Breitbart News reported this month, violent crime is rising rapidly in the Big Apple:
Democrat Mayor Eric Adams’s New York City is enduring the highest uptick in violent crime of any of the cities as there has been a 25.8 percent increase in homicide, rape, robbery, and assault, compared to the same period in 2021, Fox News reports. Moreover, the Big Apple’s crime statistics show the seven major felony categories – including the four violent crimes in conjunction with burglary, grand larceny auto, and grand larceny – have risen an astounding 38 percent through June 19 when referenced to the same time frame last year.
A survey released earlier this month found that 70 percent of New York City residents “feel less safe now than before the pandemic began.”
“Seventy-six percent reported being either somewhat or very concerned they will be the victim of a violent crime,” Breitbart News noted.
You can follow Ethan Letkeman on Twitter at @EthanLetkeman.