While I still served as a Criminal Court Judge, I was called on the carpet by one of my supervising Judges from the Office of Court Administration. Seems I had insulted a number of my fellow judges when I quoted the line from George Orwell’s Animal Farm that serves as the title of this column. I had used this phrase in an email in reference to some judges insisting on certain privileges being continued for supervising judges that were to be eliminated in a round of budget cuts for the rest of us.
“Did you mean to call them pigs?” I was asked. I was dismayed to learn that a group of educated people, including the one questioning me, did not recognize the reference. Yet, I should not have been surprised. My education came from Catholic institutions of learning that were, at the time, very anti-communist. Many of my fellow jurists did not have the benefit of that experience.
It seems clear that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has never read any Orwell. Without shame or self awareness, he practices the hypocrisy of unequal justice at every opportunity.
While justifying the prosecution of Donald Trump for allegedly falsifying his business records, Bragg intoned that “[a]s this office has done time and time again, we today uphold our solemn responsibility to ensure everyone stands equal before the law…No amount of money and no amount of power changes that enduring American principle.”
There appears to be some truth in Bragg’s statement, for money and power do not appear to be the deciding factors regarding who will be prosecuted, and who will not. Instead, that decision is now based on race, social position, and what political causes the defendant supports.
In June, “[d]ozens of anti-Israel protesters who occupied and barricaded themselves in buildings on the Columbia University campus in April had their charges dropped…[t]he office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg dropped cases against 30 students and staff members who were arrested during the campus unrest….[a]ll the protesters were arrested on April 30, hours after taking over Hamilton Hall, an academic building, and were initially charged with trespass in the third degree, a misdemeanor…[n]one of the students arrested had any prior criminal history, and all were facing disciplinary proceedings, including suspensions and expulsions, by Columbia University.”
Then, in July, “Seven pro-Palestinian protesters associated with the City College of New York (CCNY) had charges against them dropped after Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg determined there was insufficient evidence to convict them.”
Bragg’s failure to prosecute protestors who advocate for progressive causes is nothing new. Going back to 2023, CBS News reported that “misdemeanor charges against protesters who were arrested after calling for justice in the aftermath of Jordan Neely’s death have been dropped. The Manhattan district attorney’s office says it’s dropping those charges following a comprehensive review. More than a dozen arrests were made in May after protesters clashed with police in the streets of SoHo and inside a subway station.”
Remember Jordan Neely? He was the homeless black man who threatened a subway car full of passengers when he was subdued by former Marine Daniel Penny. Neely subsequently died from what the New York City Medical Examiner called “compression of neck (chokehold).” Penny, who is white, was then arrested and charged by the Manhattan DA’s Office with manslaughter.
In our discussion of this case last year, we noted the “recent, widespread pattern of ignoring the law of self-defense [and action taken in the defense of others}, and prosecuting people who, in the past, may have been considered justified in the actions they take.” In that regard, we also noted that “certain leaders of our society, particularly certain prosecutors like Alvin Bragg…seek to punish people for protecting themselves and others from violence.”
Much like store clerk Jose Alba, a Dominican immigrant who was arrested for stabbing and killing an African American man who was assaulting him, Bragg’s office ignored evidence that points towards self-defense and commenced a prosecution against Penny. In Alba’s case, however, following intense public outcry, Bragg’s office dropped charges against Alba.
No such luck for Penny. His case is scheduled to go forward to trial in October. “In January,” Fox5 New York reports, “a judge denied Penny’s request to dismiss the charges against him in the case despite the claim he acted to protect himself and other passengers.”
We made the following observation in last year’s article, and asked this question: “Unlike Alba, Penny is white, and appears to be in a better social and economic situation than Neely, who was black. Yet, like Alba, Penny has the exact same right to self-defense, as do we all. Will Alvin Bragg continue to ignore that right, and hope that a Grand Jury will ignore it too?”
Bragg has apparently answered this question in the affirmative by charging someone else with a crime who has a strong self-defense claim.
According to The Daily Mail, “[a] New York City landlord who was arrested and charged with assault after defending himself against a homeless man wielding a wooden bat…Brian Chin, 32, of Manhattan, was arraigned on second and third-degree assault charges in Manhattan Criminal Court, after being accused of beating a homeless man…[s]urveillance footage from outside of Chin’s apartment building on Chrystie Street in the Lower East Side shows the landlord trying to help the man, who is believed to have been under the influence, outside of the Grand Street subway station. The man woke up, went ballistic and attacked him with a piece of plywood that had nails in it. Chin eventually… grabb[ed] the wood with both hands and tugg[ed] it out of his grasp. But when police eventually showed up, he [Chin] was arrested and whisked off to jail.”
Chin is of Asian heritage. The homeless man is African American. The racial background of the defendant and victim should not be a factor. But as we have seen in the cases involving Alba and Penny, Bragg’s office seems very interested in prosecuting people who defend themselves against African Americans, regardless of the law of self-defense.
Much like Alba and Penny, Chin has his proponents. “’Brian is a great guy. He’s like our local community activist, leader – he wants our neighborhood to be clean,’’ said a landlord whose family has owned a building on Chrystie Street, near where the incident occurred, for more than 40 years. ‘He wants the [local Sarah Roosevelt] park for kids to be what it was intended for – not open-air drug-dealing and homeless people sleeping on the benches,’’ the source told [The New York Post] ‘And we’re deeply grateful for that.’” But to date, community sentiment in favor of Chin’s actions has had little impact on DA Bragg.
Writing in The New York Post, Wai Wah Chin, the President of the Chinese American Citizens
Alliance of Greater New York, summed up the situation presented by Chin’s arrest and prosecution; “Bragg is..the district attorney who launched his first day in office with his notorious ‘Day One Memo’ that effectively said that some people will be treated differently for certain crimes, including armed robbery… as Chin’s Chinatown neighborhood steadily deteriorated under the onslaught of Democratic soft-on-crime policies emanating not just from Bragg’s office but also from City Hall, the state Capitol and the White House, the landlord became an unpaid community activist trying to keep his block safe. All because our ideologically obsessed Democratic governments at all levels are failing miserably to fulfill the most fundamental of government responsibilities: that of ensuring basic physical safety for its citizens…[f]or Bragg, the law is a vehicle for his political agenda, which stands above everyone and everything else.”
The logic of Wai Wah Chin’s position is inescapable. Since his election, Alvin Bragg has used the power and authority of his office to prosecute people who have a strong self-defense claim, usually when that person is defending them self or others against someone who is African American. Bragg has also failed to prosecute individuals who engage in civil disorder, so long as those persons are acting in support of causes of which Bragg and his fellow progressives approve.
For how long will New Yorkers tolerate this injustice? The truth of Orwell’s statement about some pigs being more equal only applies when we allow those pigs to assert greater rights than the rest of us.
It is long past time to halt the piggish behavior of a District Attorney like Alvin Bragg.
Judge John Wilson served on the bench in NYC