10/05/2012 - Myclipp

spokesman for Mr. Hynes. Prosecutors in the district
attorney’s office emphasized that the Kol Tzedek
program, which has a hot line, a part-time social
worker and links to social service agencies,
demonstrated that Mr. Hynes cared deeply about the
issue. “This is an incredible success,” said Rhonnie
Jaus, chief of his sex crimes division. “I know how
many cases we used to have before that. When I say a
handful, I mean a handful every single year. It’s
ridiculous the difference we have that I see with my
own eyes between before the start of Kol Tzedek and
now.” Asked whether the office was exaggerating the
program’s impact, she said all of the victims involved
took advantage of the program’s services. “Our
numbers are not inflated,” she said. “If anything, they
are conservative.” Still, some who have urged more
aggressive prosecution said Mr. Hynes was too
beholden to ultra-Orthodox rabbis for political support.
Rabbi Yosef Blau of Yeshiva University was one of the
few victims’ advocates who attended the Hanukkah
party in December. “Basically, I looked around the
room and the message that I got is: You are in bed
with all the fixers in Brooklyn,” Rabbi Blau said.
“Nothing is going to change, because these people,
the message they got is: These are the ones that
count.” Potential Conflicts of Interest David Zimmer
was 25 when he groped a 9-year-old girl in a garage in
Borough Park, court records said. “She liked it,” he
later told the police. He then took two sisters there,
ages 9 and 10. In August 1998, he was accused of
raping the 10-year-old, according to court documents.
The police arrested Mr. Zimmer that year, but the
case’s impact on the credibility of Mr. Hynes’s office
resonates today. Back then, prosecutors seemed in a
strong position, with a handwritten confession from Mr.
Zimmer. Initially charged with more than 24 counts of
sex offenses, he pleaded guilty to one count of sexual
abuse in the first degree and received five years’
probation. Mr. Zimmer’s lawyer was Asher White, who
is married to Henna White, Mr. Hynes’s longtime
liaison to the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. Ms.
White, an adherent of the Chabad Lubavitch Hasidic
movement, makes $138,000 a year, more than most of
Mr. Hynes’s prosecutors. Ms. White organizes
gatherings like the Hanukkah celebration, while
overseeing the Kol Tzedek program. As a result, she
has dual roles: she is supposed to encourage
ultra-Orthodox victims to come forward despite
opposition from some rabbis, even as she tries to
maintain relationships with rabbis generally. Ms. White
and her husband declined to respond to questions
about Mr. Zimmer’s case, or to disclose whether they
had discussed it with each other. Prosecutors said Ms.
White had no involvement, but entanglements like
these have long raised questions about how Mr. Hynes
handles prosecutions in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish
community. Hopes that probation and treatment would
The New York Times/ - Politics, Sex, 11 de Maio de 2012
CLIPPING INTERNACIONAL (Constitutional Law)
lead to the rehabilitation of Mr. Zimmer were shaken
when new accusations surfaced: A prosecutor this
month told a judge that while working as a locksmith in
recent years, Mr. Zimmer went into homes and
repeatedly molested children who lived there. The
police discovered that he had kept a diary detailing the
many times that he had abused children, the
prosecutor said.Jo Craven McGinty, Griff Palmer and
Tom Torok contributed reporting. This article has been
revised to reflect the following correction:Correction:
May 11, 2012
A previous version of this article misspelled the
surname of the executive vice president of Agudath
Israel of America as Zweibel. He pleaded not guilty to
charges of sexually abusing four girls, ages 6 to 10. He
is being held on $1 million bond. Ms. Jaus said the
original plea agreement was the best that the office
could do because the victims’ parents did not want
them to testify.“I have never received any pressure to
do anything in a particular case,” she said. But the
father of the first 9-year-old, who said he never knew
about Mr. White’s involvement, said he would have
allowed his daughter to take the stand. “The district
attorney’s office called me and said this guy’s not 100
percent normal, so they were going to give him
probation,” said the father, who asked not to be
identified to protect his daughter’s identity. “If they
don’t want to prosecute, what are you going to do?”
Mr. Hynes often describes how, growing up in the only
non-Jewish family in his building in Flatbush, he spent
the Jewish Sabbath turning on lights for his Orthodox
neighbors, who could not perform such tasks under
Jewish law. When he was the only non-Jew in a
four-way Democratic primary in his failed 1994 bid for
attorney general of New York State, he placed
advertisements in Jewish publications signed by more
than 150 Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jewish leaders.
“I’m really the Jew in this race,” he joked to a reporter
for The Jewish Week. Referring to his opponents, he
said, “I probably know more Yiddish than they do
combined.” Mr. Hynes’s attention to the ultra-Orthodox
Jewish community has translated into votes. In 2005,
when Mr. Hynes eked out a 42 percent to 37 percent
victory in the Democratic primary for district attorney,
he won in a landslide in several ultra-Orthodox Jewish
neighborhoods. In one election district in Williamsburg
that is filled with Hasidic synagogues, Mr. Hynes pulled
in 84 percent of the vote, according to election records.
The relationship has not always been smooth. He
angered many of his closest ultra-Orthodox Jewish
supporters in 1999 when he charged Bernard Freilich,
a popular rabbi, with intimidating a witness in a sexual
abuse case. Rabbi Freilich was acquitted the next
year. “I never knew of cases in which Joe Hynes
bowed to community pressure,” said Aaron Twerski,
former dean of the Hofstra University School of Law,
who had served with Rabbi Freilich as community
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