Ted Alcorn

Led for 28 years by Richard Brown until his death in May, the prosecutor’s office had in many respects been frozen in time. But the candidates vying to replace him campaigned on reform, none more so than Tiffany Cabán, the 31-year-old public defender who is as intent on constraining the office’s powers as she is on exercising them.

Neck and neck with Melinda Katz, the Queens borough president, Cabán ran a campaign that attracted the endorsement of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and seemed to signal that the wave of progressive prosecutors elected to big cities across the country — from Chicago to Dallas to Philadelphia — had arrived in New York.

But you wouldn’t know it in Staten Island, the last holdout borough with a law-and-order brand of criminal justice, where the incumbent district attorney, Michael McMahon, is coasting toward re-election unopposed. While the city’s other prosecutor’s offices have adopted the trappings of reform, if not always its substance, his has generally defied the trend. Local advocates may disagree with many of his positions, but as in more conservative areas nationwide, they are uncertain if they should hope for more.

If McMahon drew any meaning from Cabán’s surprisingly strong showing, he tries not to show it. “There was a primary in Queens?” he asked in mock ignorance. Silver-haired and dapper at 61, he was seated in his ninth-floor office in the Mark A. Costantino Judicial Center, with a view of the tankers traversing Upper New York Bay and the skylines of the other boroughs beyond. But his focus is firmly on Staten Island.

The borough’s voters know McMahon well. A Democrat first elected to New York City Council in 2001 by the island’s diverse North Shore, where he lives in the affluent Randall Manor neighborhood, he then won a seat in Congress in 2008. His moderate record there, including his vote against the Affordable Care Act, put him at the dead center of the ideological spectrum but was not enough to stave off defeat two years later during the Tea Party wave.

The seat for district attorney opened in 2015, and he ran against a career prosecutor who criticized him as a politician inexperienced in criminal law. McMahon won handily. Largely absent from the contest was any discussion of the death of Eric Garner during an encounter with the police on Staten Island the year before and a grand jury’s subsequent decision not to indict any involved officers. McMahon avoided commenting on the case itself, but he suggested his predecessor could have better explained the investigation and grand jury process to the public. This week, federal prosecutors also declined to bring criminal civil rights charges in the case.

As the DA, McMahon maintains the busy public schedule of a politician. Staten Island is the only borough with its own major daily newspaper, the Advance, and it covers his appearances frequently. The elevator bay at the district attorney’s office is decorated with recent clippings: a veteran’s event on Flag Day where McMahon spoke, a ceremony to rename a street for a police chief.

He has also attracted new resources to the office, expanding its budget from $11 million in 2016 to $17 million in 2019, increasing the number of attorneys by 58%, and opening new bureaus to investigate narcotics crimes, address domestic violence and engage with community members about their concerns.

On high-profile issues, McMahon has made a habit of parting ways with the city’s more progressive district attorneys. In 2017, when the city’s other prosecutors collectively dismissed 644,000 decade-old summons warrants for minor offenses, he was conspicuously absent.

After the Brooklyn and Manhattan district attorneys announced last summer that they would stop prosecuting arrests for marijuana possession and public smoking, McMahon criticized the change as rash and said he wouldn’t join them. Controlling for population, in 2018 Staten Island had more convictions for marijuana possession in the fifth degree — typically charged when someone is caught smoking or holding a small amount in public view — than any other borough, according to an analysis of data from the State Division of Criminal Justice Services.

And this spring, after prosecutors from New York and elsewhere voiced support for ending cash bail, McMahon published an op-ed in the Advance warning that the current wave of criminal justice reform would “sweep us back to the Dark Ages of criminality of the ’70s and ’80s, and give the wild gangs, violent thugs, death-dealing pushers and violators of women and children the keys to the city.”

His office employs bail more often than other city prosecutors’, too, demanding it for a higher share of misdemeanor and nonviolent felony cases than any other borough, according to 2018 data from the New York City Criminal Justice Agency. And public defenders say his office is more intransigent in plea-bargaining, giving defendants little room to resolve their cases without criminal penalties.

“While other district attorneys in New York City — especially the Manhattan and Queens offices — have gotten a lot of attention recently for their more punitive and regressive approaches to prosecution, I think Mr. McMahon has sailed under the radar for too long,” said Insha Rahman, the director of strategies and new initiatives at the nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice.

But McMahon rejects the characterization of being behind the times. “It’s sometimes misconstrued that we oppose reform,” he said. “It’s quite the opposite. I think in many ways, we’re ahead of the curve.”

One area in which that might be the case is his approach to the opioid epidemic, which was cresting in Staten Island when he took office. Early in his term he personally led the development of the Heroin Overdose Prevention and Education (HOPE) diversion program for people with little or no criminal record who are arrested for a minor drug offense. HOPE allows them to avoid a court appearance entirely, directing them instead to a peer mentor and treatment services. Since its inception in January 2017, 570 people have completed the program, and Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx have replicated it.

But the term McMahon most frequently invokes to describe his approach is “balanced.” And true to his word, no sooner was he done describing HOPE to me than he burnished his tough-on-crime credentials by boasting that his office was the first in New York City to bring manslaughter charges against a drug dealer for the overdose death of a customer.

Christopher Pisciotta, the head of Legal Aid’s Staten Island office whose attorneys represent the majority of defendants charged by the district attorney’s office, said he welcomed McMahon’s diversion program for those eligible to participate. “I’ve got to give him credit: I think it was an innovative program at the time.” But Pisciotta was critical of how HOPE excludes people with lengthier criminal histories and said it should be greatly expanded. Advocacy groups point out that, overall, the number of people diverted to treatment services by other Staten Island programs has actually fallen.

Diane Arneth, executive director of Community Health Action of Staten Island, which worked with McMahon to develop HOPE, said she would also like to see the criteria for eligibility expanded. Nor did she defend the hard line McMahon has taken toward other substances. “The district attorney and I probably don’t agree on his approach to marijuana, and we can agree to disagree,” she said. “But we found common ground in this other area, so I am not going to throw the baby out with the bath water.”

The political reality is that the voters McMahon depends on for re-election are more conservative than the electorate in the other boroughs. The share of Staten Island’s population that is white is double that of the city as a whole, and 70% of the borough’s residents were born in New York state, compared with 48% citywide.

There are more homeowners, too: In Staten Island, 2 in 3 homes are owner-occupied; citywide, 1 in 3 are.

Although registered Democrats still outnumber Republicans, elected officials there must be ever mindful of their right flank, said political consultant Jerry Skurnik, who counts McMahon among his clients. “For a Democrat on Staten Island,” he said, “that comes with the territory.” (Rep. Max Rose, a moderate freshman Democrat representing the area, is another politician who has had to balance appealing to conservatives with speaking out on reform.)

Members of law enforcement are overrepresented on Staten Island, too, where they make up a higher share of the population than in any other borough, and McMahon has earned the enthusiastic endorsement of many of their unions, including the Detectives’ Endowment Association.

“The detectives love Mike,” said Tom Scotto, 76, a former president of the association who served as a detective on Staten Island for 14 years and later retired to the island’s conservative South Shore. His daughter and son also joined the police department, and two of his grandsons are officers in the borough’s 120th precinct. Scotto said he sees the district attorney at nearly every police function. “Not for publicity — he just shows up, shakes hands and has a beer.”

But McMahon doesn’t shy away from those with a different vision for his office. Mike Perry, who grew up in the Richmond Terrace public housing project and helps run the community-based anti-violence nonprofit True 2 Life in the Stapleton section of the borough, is emphatically opposed to much of how the criminal justice system operates. But he says that McMahon has spoken supportively of True 2 Life’s work and participated in several of its events.

“A lot of times, DAs are distant, but McMahon has been in the communities. He’s been out there. And we appreciate him for that.”

Where law-and-order justice still reigns in New York city

NEW YORK — Three weeks after the Democratic primary for Queens district attorney, where the leading candidates are separated by 16 votes and election officials are undertaking a painstaking manual recount, the only certain outcome is change.

Instead of finishing them, she would be handcuffed, taken to the local precinct to be fingerprinted and locked in a cell — all for failing to pay a traffic ticket. “I was virtually moved to tears,” she recalled a month later, smartly dressed and awaiting her turn in a Staten Island courtroom. “It was all surreal and ridiculous — for a fine.”

In New York state, a driver can lose her license for reckless behavior on the road, like driving under the influence of alcohol or accumulating too many driving violation points.

But more often than not, licenses are suspended for outstanding debt: If a person fails to pay a traffic ticket or does not show up in court to dispose of it, the court can notify the Department of Motor Vehicles, which then imposes a “scoff” — short for scofflaw — that suspends the person’s driving privileges until the debt is paid.

Nearly two-thirds of all license suspensions are for failure to pay tickets or failure to appear in court, according to DMV data. These suspensions are not a rebuke for poor driving; if the motorist had paid her ticket, she would still be allowed on the road. Yet the consequences are just as stiff: Anyone caught driving with a suspended license — whether or not she is aware of it — may be arrested.

The police and prosecutors say that suspending drivers’ privileges for unpaid tickets and pressing criminal charges against those who continue driving is simply a matter of law and order. According to Staten Island’s district attorney, Michael McMahon, a Democrat, pedestrian injuries in the borough are up 30% this year, a guiding factor in how the department handles these cases.

“It’s not about someone paying a fine,” McMahon said. “It’s about someone getting a ticket for violating a law in how they operated their vehicle, most times in an unsafe fashion, and it’s the danger that poses to the people of Staten Island.

But advocates contend that in yanking motorists’ licenses to force them to pay fines, the state is acting less as a defender of public safety than as a collection agency.

And now state lawmakers are getting involved. In late April, Sen. Timothy Kennedy, chairman of the Transportation Committee, introduced a bill that would end the practice of suspending driver’s licenses for failing to pay traffic tickets or failing to appear in court.

Kennedy, a Democrat, said that in his district in Buffalo, one of the poorest in the state, the cycle of unpaid tickets and driver’s license suspensions can be financially devastating. He said he expects to hold a vote on the bill this month in the Senate’s Transportation Committee. His bill would also let drivers pay their fines in installments.

According to a group of advocacy organizations that supports the bill, the Driven by Justice Coalition, the practice of suspending driving privileges for lack of payment is more extensive, and causes more enduring harm, than previously known.

In 2016, New York state issued 679,000 driver’s license suspensions for a failure to pay fines or show up in court, according to DMV data obtained through a Freedom of Information Law request by the National Center for Law and Economic Justice. Nearly half of those suspensions were still unresolved a year later.

Since multiple “scoffs” can be imposed on a single driver, it is not possible to determine exactly how many drivers had their license suspended. But the coalition’s analysis makes clear that some areas of the state are hit much harder than others.

In half of all New York ZIP codes, there were a little more than three suspensions for every 100 residents old enough to drive. But in areas of central Rochester — where the majority of the population is black, and more than 40% live below the poverty line — suspensions were issued at 10 times that rate.

In New York City, Staten Island has the highest rate of suspensions, double that of Manhattan and among the highest of any county in the state. Roughly 23,000 suspensions were issued to residents of the borough in 2016.

On a Monday morning last month, the Staten Island courthouse was full of people arrested on charges of driving with a suspended license, which account for nearly 20% of prosecutors’ entire caseloads in the borough. Coakley sat stoically in the gallery.

On the day of her arrest, she had driven to Staten Island to have her car’s oil changed by a trusted mechanic. The officer cited her hands-free headset as the reason for the stop — and then a search of her license turned up an unpaid fine from several years prior. She had recently moved, and said she had never received a notification that her license had been suspended.

The officer allowed her to step behind her car where she would not be visible from the road before putting her into handcuffs. He then drove her to the precinct for processing, leaving her car on the side of the road. Two and a half hours later, when she was released, she took a $31 Lyft back to Brooklyn, and that night returned to Staten Island with a friend to retrieve her car. Coakley said she had not driven in the weeks since.

Coakley waited in court for hours for proceedings that were over in minutes. Having already paid the overdue fine online, she agreed to complete a driver’s safety class and return to court again, at which point the criminal charge would be reduced to a traffic violation.

Coakley said she could afford to pay her ticket and associated fees. But for those without the means to pay, a driver’s license suspension can pose a double burden: being saddled with new debt and deprived of driving privileges that are often necessary for making money to pay it off.

Pete Kelly, 45, was also waiting in court that day for his turn before a judge. His tanned face and soil-stained hands betrayed his profession working for a tree-services company. He is licensed to drive almost any vehicle on the road, and he happily ticked some off: spider lift, skid steer, tractor-trailer. “The only thing I really want to get is a Zamboni license,” he said. “That’s last.”

But his proficiency behind the wheel afforded him no special protection when he and colleagues were driving the company’s fleet across the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge one day in March and were stopped at a checkpoint for commercial vehicles. The officer who ran Kelly’s license found that his driving privileges had been suspended because of a decade-old speeding ticket that he had never paid. He was arrested in front of his co-workers.

Between the ticket itself, the fee to lift the license suspension and the court costs, Kelly estimates the incident will easily cost him $500. And that amount does not account for the time he has taken off to resolve the case. “I’m losing a day’s pay right now,” he said while awaiting his turn before the court.

He has little recourse but to pay in full. Like Coakley, he was charged with aggravated unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle. Prosecutors in Staten Island generally will not reduce that to a traffic violation unless the defendant first clears all outstanding tickets and license suspensions.

But for defendants who have accumulated multiple suspensions, such debts may be insurmountable. Russell Pleasant, a lifelong resident of Staten Island, is facing a $3,295 judgment stemming from unpaid tickets issued on three occasions in the mid-1990s that snowballed into 17 license suspensions. Arrested in February, he was ordered to pay the debt completely or accept a misdemeanor conviction. At age 57, it would be his first.

To earn that amount, Pleasant would need to work five weeks at the Ikea warehouse where he is now a forklift operator, a job he said he retrained for this winter after the house his family was living in burned down. “There’s people out there that really deserve criminal records,” he said. “I just don’t think I’m one of them.”

McMahon said his office considers defendants’ ability to pay, but he maintained that the law should be applied evenly to everyone charged with driving on a suspended license. “There are some poor; there are some rich,” he said. “But don’t run red lights, don’t talk with your cellphone and you won’t get a ticket.”

New York is hardly alone in these practices. Forty-one states suspend driver’s licenses for unpaid traffic tickets. But since 2017, California, Mississippi, Idaho and Washington, D.C., have ended driver’s license suspensions for nonpayment of fines and fees.

In Virginia, the Legal Aid Justice Center helped file a class-action lawsuit challenging the state’s practice of automatically suspending the driving privileges of motorists who failed to pay traffic fines or court costs. In December 2018, a judge granted the drivers a preliminary injunction and ordered the state to reinstate their licenses while the case moved forward, setting a trial for August. Similar lawsuits have been filed in six other states.

Which isn’t to say that suspending driving privileges can’t be an appropriate remedy for some misconduct. Marco Conner, the interim director of the nonprofit Transportation Alternatives, which advocates for safer streets, said he would like to see suspensions employed even more liberally for motorists who have driven recklessly — but not to compel people to pay fines. “We do not support, in any way, license suspensions for anything unrelated to dangerous driving,” he said.

For those with no alternative form of transportation, even a suspended license may not keep them off the road.

On the day of his court appearance, Kelly said he still had not regained his driving privileges. How, then, did he get to the courthouse on Staten Island from where he’s staying in Netcong, New Jersey, at least a three-hour trip by public transportation?

“You don’t want to know,” he said.

This article originally appeared in <a id="447e8f1b-07ad-4b68-b445-161ff1eb1d62" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/08/nyregion/suspending-licenses-minor-offense-money.html">The New York Times</a>.

Handcuffed and arrested for not paying a traffic ticket

NEW YORK — The police officer returned Angela-Renee Coakley’s license and registration and asked for the keys to her car. It was midafternoon on one of the first nice days of spring, and Coakley, a 53-year-old event and concert producer from Brooklyn, had driven to Staten Island to do some errands.

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Ted Alcorn

Articles written by the author

Where law-and-order justice still reigns in New York city

Handcuffed and arrested for not paying a traffic ticket