handwritten notes two years before<\/a> Bell\u2019s trial, identifying one Speedstick member as the likely getaway driver in the check-cashing murders. The prosecution also had documentation that the witness who first accused the three men of the crime had a history of auditory hallucinations and had recently attempted suicide.<\/p>\nNone of this evidence was turned over, a fact the district attorney’s office itself acknowledged when it joined the motion to clear the convictions. At one point a newspaper report linked the gang\u2019s leaders to the murders, but when Bell\u2019s attorney asked the prosecution for this evidence, they were told it didn\u2019t exist, the judge wrote. When they pressed Testagrossa at trial, he told the court there was \u201cno connection\u201d between the Speedstick gang and the check-cashing murders. Leventhal, his cocounsel, described the defense\u2019s repeated requests as a \u201cfishing expedition,\u201d according to trial exchanges quoted in Zayas’ ruling.<\/p>\n
By the time Zayas made his ruling, the Queens district attorney\u2019s office had completed its own reinvestigation of the case and had agreed exculpatory evidence had been withheld at trial, according to records. The judge was unsparing in both his written judgment and his comments from the bench.<\/p>\n
The prosecution, he wrote, \u201ccompletely abdicated its truth-seeking role\u201d in a case where the stakes \u201ccould not have been higher,\u201d a reference to the fact that the state had initially sought the death penalty for then-19-year-old Bell, who had no criminal record.<\/p>\n
From the bench, according to transcripts, he went further still: \u201cInstead of acting as truth seekers, the prosecution team sought ways to suppress and hide evidence, hide the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n
Within days, Leventhal resigned from his post at St. John\u2019s University School of Law, in Queens, where he taught an evidence class. \u201cThe prosecutor\u2019s role is not to win, but to do justice,\u201d the school\u2019s dean wrote in a March 2021 email to students, in which he announced Leventhal\u2019s resignation. Both prosecutors resigned from their DA jobs around this time, Leventhal in Queens and Testagrossa in Nassau County.<\/p>\n
A five-year investigation<\/p>\n
In the months following Zayas\u2019 ruling, Marc Wolinsky, an attorney who had represented Bell pro bono during his exoneration proceedings, turned to the state\u2019s attorney grievance process to seek some sort of formal reprimand. Wolinsky declined to speak with Gothamist for this story.<\/p>\n
The July 14, 2026 dismissal letter addressed to him and obtained by Gothamist through another party does not name the seven subjects of the complaints, only identifying them by case numbers. But attorneys for Testagrossa and Leventhal confirmed the complaints against the two men were recently dismissed.<\/p>\n
Under state law, complaints against lawyers, along with the resulting investigations, are kept entirely confidential unless the issue is referred to the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court and the court decides to take disciplinary action.<\/p>\n
What the committee did during the past five years is known only to the participants.<\/p>\n
Robert Masters, a former senior Queens prosecutor who represented Leventhal pro bono and calls him a close personal friend, described a long, exhaustive review of the record involving an initial submission that included hundreds of pages of exhibits followed by rounds of follow-up inquiries from the committee. Masters said he also presented a number of character letters from defense attorneys and retired judges on Leventhal\u2019s behalf.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not clear whether the committee was engaged in active investigation during the entire five-year period. Masters said he believes the committee may have paused to allow the civil litigation to conclude in case it surfaced anything new.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would say, looking at it with an unjaundiced eye \u2026 accusations made, allegations made in a fairly compressed time period that are found ultimately not to be supported after a five-year investigation, I’d be hard-pressed to criticize that process,\u201d Masters said.<\/p>\n
Both Masters and John Leventhal, a retired judge who represented Testagrossa during the proceedings, noted that the committee had much more time to review the case. At the time of the exoneration, Zayas noted he\u2019d only had the case for two-and-a-half weeks.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe grievance committee did a complete investigation, a thorough investigation, and for five years, and they found there was insufficient evidence of professional misconduct,\u201d John Leventhal said.<\/p>\n
The attorneys also pointed to what the Queens district attorney\u2019s office concluded at the time of the exoneration. Though the office\u2019s Conviction Integrity Unit, a special bureau that reinvestigates potential wrongful convictions, had found its prosecutors failed to turn over evidence pointing to other suspects, the office believed they\u2019d done so unknowingly. \u201cThe defendants were prosecuted in good faith and with legally sufficient evidence,\u201d the unit\u2019s chief wrote in his court filing.<\/p>\n
At the time, Zayas addressed the chief\u2019s language directly, pushing back on the notion they had, indeed, acted in \u201cgood faith,\u201d noting that, either way, their misconduct had led to three wrongful convictions.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors rarely sanctioned<\/p>\n
The length of the committee\u2019s investigation only makes the thin notice of a dismissal more confounding for critics of the grievance process.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can’t figure out, for the life of me, how anybody investigating this could determine anything other than that there was egregious misconduct,\u201d Zeidman said. \u201cI try and imagine a stronger case. What do you need, like a prosecutor on tape saying, \u2018I deliberately withheld exculpatory material\u2019?\u201d<\/p>\n
Zeidman isn\u2019t alone. Hal Lieberman, a former chief counsel of the disciplinary committee covering Manhattan and the Bronx and an expert in legal ethics, has been following the case for years and was similarly confounded. He describes himself as professional friends with Wolinsky, Bell\u2019s attorney.<\/p>\n
Based on the judicial findings, \u201cand what I have heard about the Attorney Grievance Committee’s investigation, there seems to be an overwhelming amount of evidence that George Bell and his codefendants were wrongfully convicted of murder due to very serious ethical violations,\u201d Lieberman said. \u201cIt is astounding that [the committee] delayed for five years and then saw fit to do nothing about disciplining these former government lawyers.”<\/p>\n
Mitch Dinnerstein, Bell\u2019s original trial lawyer, has stayed with the case for nearly three decades. He called the outcome \u201cunconscionable.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat else did they need?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s something of a miracle any of this has come to light, Dinnerstein said. The initial buried police reports that launched the reinvestigation into Bell\u2019s conviction surfaced by chance. They\u2019d been included in a set of documents given to a different attorney working a different case, who happened to recognize their importance.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were lucky that we found these police reports that were buried,\u201d Dinnerstein said. \u201cIf we never found them, those guys would still be in prison, and that’s really scary.\u201d<\/p>\n
Still, critics of the review system say dismissal wasn\u2019t entirely shocking.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou could look at the number of times the grievance commission goes after a prosecutor, and the answer is basically zero,\u201d Dinnerstein said.<\/p>\n
Peter Santina, with the group Civil Rights Corps, said he\u2019s aware of fewer than five instances of a New York prosecutor\u2019s law license being suspended for on-the-job misconduct and has yet to find a case of a prosecutor being disbarred. That\u2019s based on his group\u2019s searches of court records and news reports \u2014 since no public system tracks findings of prosecutorial misconduct.<\/p>\n
However, there\u2019s a chance the process is on the verge of major change. Over the past five years, Civil Rights Corps and the professors with Accountability New York have filed dozens of complaints against prosecutors flowing from judicial findings of misconduct. Two weeks ago the Second Circuit ruled that the groups have a right to the grievance committees\u2019 dispositions and records related to hearings in their cases.<\/p>\n
The coalition\u2019s own complaints against Testagrossa and Leventhal, filed separately from Wolinsky’s, are among those covered by the ruling.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat provides an opportunity to actually see what the grievance committee did or did not do, and the decision they reached,\u201d Santina said, speaking about the decision broadly. \u201cWe hope that it’ll provide insight into what their justifications are for their decisions, whatever those are.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Five years ago, one of the state\u2019s top judges found Queens prosecutors had deliberately hidden evidence that could…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":322998,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[9,24,63,122,124,123],"class_list":["post-322997","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322997","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=322997"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322997\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/322998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=322997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=322997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=322997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}