For more than a decade, defense attorneys, innocence advocates and the wrongfully convicted have pushed Albany to create a body that could hold New York prosecutors accountable for their actions in court. In 2021, they finally got it.

Now, two years after the state’s Commission on Prosecutorial Conduct named an administrator and began taking complaints, the people who fought hardest are asking a hard question: Is it actually going to do anything?

So far, the commission has issued findings and recommendations in only one case — an upstate district attorney’s viral traffic stop, referred by Gov. Kathy Hochul. Advocates, meanwhile, have submitted at least three dozen complaints involving judicial findings of prosecutorial misconduct or behavior that could constitute misconduct, none of which has resulted in public discipline.

Among them are a Queens prosecutor whose withholding of evidence contributed to three wrongful convictions spanning 24 years; a Brooklyn prosecutor who failed to disclose that the case’s only eyewitness had identified someone else as the killer, costing a man 25 years of his life; and a prosecutor who kept a written guide ranking jurors by race and ethnicity, in violation of constitutional protections against racial bias in jury selection.

Susan Friedman, the commission’s administrator, defended the agency’s progress in an interview with Gothamist. “While the passage of the statute creating the commission has a long history, the actual commission itself is still very new,” she said. “There is a lot that goes into standing up an agency that did not exist before March 2024.”

This week, the commission released its second annual report — roughly five pages, not counting appendixes — detailing the difficult process of establishing a new government bureaucracy, including finding office space and hiring attorneys and investigators. In the past two years, the report notes, the commission has received 479 complaints, and staff completed preliminary reports for a third of them. Of those, 18 have resulted in investigations.

Friedman, a former innocence attorney, retains considerable goodwill among a half dozen attorneys and advocates Gothamist spoke with, but they all worry the commission is not moving aggressively enough.

“As soon as they do one [case], as soon as they do one, it will have such an impact on prosecutors,” said Thomas Hoffman, a New York City innocence attorney. He doesn’t count the case upstate — which didn’t involve conduct that affected a case — and believes the office should be focused on trial misconduct. “She shouldn’t have done what she did, of course … but her actions did not result in people going to prison for 20 or 40 years. Why was that a priority?”

A false start

The commission didn’t arrive easily. For years, groups like the advocacy organization It Could Happen to You and the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers pushed state lawmakers to create an independent body to oversee prosecutors similar to the state’s Judicial Conduct Commission.

The grievance committee system, the existing mechanism for disciplining attorneys, was inadequate, they said.

The Legislature passed an initial version of the commission bill in 2018. Still, the state’s district attorney association sued to block it, arguing that the Legislature invested it with powers of discipline it shouldn’t have. Eventually, a state court struck the commission down on separation-of-powers grounds.

Lawmakers tried again and passed a revised commission into law in June 2021. “People were thrilled,” said CUNY Law professor Steve Zeidman. But delays persisted, and it took years for the commission to reach a quorum.

Under the law, the governor and other top officials must each appoint several members to the commission. Advocates say they had to mount a public pressure campaign to force action. Hochul finally made her first appointments in February 2023, a year-and-a-half after the law’s passage.

Commission members appointed Friedman as the administrator a year later. For much of her first year, she had no office and worked from home. The commission’s own annual report confirms it didn’t open its first office, a temporary sublease in Lower Manhattan, until November 2025. It is still searching for a permanent location.

“That’s an extraordinary number of complaints for two people to review and process.”

Susan Friedman, the Commission on Prosecutorial Conduct’s administrator

Friedman is frank about the obstacles.

“I started in March of 2024. It was just me and there was nothing else,” she told Gothamist.

She had to establish operating rules — a process that involved two rounds of public comment — build an intake system and secure basic office supplies. She also had to hire. Between March and December last year, her office was operating with only two attorneys while fielding hundreds of complaints. All told, they filed 168 preliminary reports to the commission.

“That’s an extraordinary number of complaints for two people to review and process,” Friedman said.

The other 300 complaints remain in the backlog, but Friedman is optimistic the agency will clear them this year. She now has seven on staff, with two more lawyers starting later this month. She’s also interviewing candidates for a deputy in Albany. Eventually, the plan is to employ a total of 19, including attorneys, investigators and other staff.

The attorneys Gothamist spoke with all acknowledged the challenges of setting up the commission.

“I do think it took a while for them to get going,” said Noreen McCarthy, who chairs a committee on prosecutor and judicial complaints for the state’s defense lawyer association. Still, she said, “We are frustrated that there hasn’t been anything except for the Doorley complaint,” a reference to the commission’s one completed investigation.

That case involved Sandra Doorley, the former Monroe County district attorney. After a video of police pulling Doorley over for a traffic stop went viral in April 2024, Hochul referred the matter to the commission. The footage showed Doorley refusing to pull over, calling the police chief, invoking her office repeatedly and cursing at the officer who had followed her home.

The commission censured Doorley in June 2025. She resigned that August.

It struck many — including Bennett Gershman, a law professor at Pace University and legal ethics expert — as an odd choice for a first case, particularly because the case had nothing to do with courtroom conduct.

“There are loads and loads of typical cases of prosecutors hiding [exculpatory] information, engaging in inflammatory conduct in the courtroom, suborning perjury and on and on,” he said.

When asked about the decision, Friedman said, “I am not going to comment on how we prioritize cases.”

A full inbox

What is clear is that the commission has no shortage of substantive cases to work with. Bill Bastuk has spent years as one of the most persistent advocates for prosecutorial accountability in New York. His organization, It Could Happen to You, was among the groups that spent years pushing for the commission’s creation. Once it existed, Bastuk got to work filling its inbox.

Beginning in late 2024, he and his staff filed three dozen complaints with the commission, emails shared with Gothamist confirm.

All of them were based on detailed legal grievances prepared by the Civil Rights Corps’ New York accountability project, a group of civil rights attorneys and law professors who spent years combing through court records to identify cases where judges had explicitly found prosecutorial misconduct. Several have already made headlines.

The bar for inclusion was deliberately high. “Unless and until there is a finding — a written finding, something published saying that the prosecutor engaged in misconduct — we’re not going to file any sort of grievance,” said Zeidman, who helped prepare the original complaints.

However, Friedman noted in the interview that as strong as a judicial opinion might be, the commission is “an independent body that needs to evaluate the record for themselves and make findings.”

In July, Bastuk wrote to the commission inquiring about the status of the complaints and warning that its lack of visible action was becoming a public perception problem. Seven years after the first commission bill was passed, he noted, the agency had yet to complete a single investigation of courtroom misconduct or refer any case to the state’s attorney grievance committee. “The commission cannot succeed without public support,” he wrote.

Friedman responded the following month. Bastuk’s complaints were still pending, she wrote, but she could not share more information due to the commission’s confidentiality mandate. She also defended the agency’s pace.

“Building an agency from scratch is a significant undertaking that takes time,” she wrote. “The commissioners and I are working diligently to get the commission past the startup phase.”

Though Bastuk said he’s surprised nothing has come from the complaints yet, he still has faith in Friedman’s leadership. He expects that after the investigations are complete, “there will be a number of recommendations to the grievance committee for the consequences of their behavior. … Otherwise, the commission is just a paper tiger.”

Built to fail

Others are less sure.

“That seems like low-hanging fruit, and what I’m concerned about is does this reflect some degree of reluctance on her or the commission’s part to really tackle the job?” Zeidman said.

“People should be nervous,” said Marvin Schechter, a veteran defense attorney who was instrumental in getting the commission legislation passed. “It’s complicated when you set up these commissions, but it ain’t that complicated.”

The deck, Schechter says, has been stacked against the commission from the start. The district attorneys’ association fought its creation for a decade, and its opponents didn’t stop pushing back once it became law. The attorneys Gothamist spoke with also noted that Hochul’s appointees for the commission include Daniel Alonso, a former prosecutor who had publicly opposed its creation before his appointment.

“The longer they wait to take action on verifiable cases of misconduct, they begin to lose credibility, no matter how well intentioned”

Steve Zeidman, CUNY Law professor

Schechter sees a troubling sign even in the commission’s single completed case. In a concurring opinion in the Doorley matter, Commissioner Amy Marion — joined by three colleagues — wrote that she agreed to the limited sanction of public censure because Doorley had testified under oath that she intended to resign. To Schechter, the fact that four commissioners felt the need to say that out loud speaks volumes.

“I think you could infer … that there were people inside that commission who were fighting for Doorley not to be disciplined or to be given a slap on the wrist,” he said.

Marion did not respond to a request for comment.

When asked about those concerns, Friedman said she has no such worries.

“I feel very supported by the commissioners,” she told Gothamist. “Everyone is doing the work, they’re reviewing the materials. I’m able to talk to them about any issues that come up.”

She declined, however, to say how often the commission’s vote to move from a preliminary report into an investigation diverges from her own recommendations. So far, the commissioners have dismissed 151 complaints. “I can’t get into the specifics of how votes come down,” she said.

That opacity frustrates advocates who want to understand whether the bottleneck is staffing and resources, problems that can be fixed, or something more fundamental.

For now, most say they are willing to give Friedman the time she’s asking for as she builds out its Albany presence and works through the backlog. But patience has its limits.

“The longer they wait to take action on verifiable cases of misconduct, they begin to lose credibility,” Zeidman said, “no matter how well intentioned.”