Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance is likely stepping down at the end of the year, leaving a wide-open field for candidates who are vying for one of the most influential jobs in law enforcement, one that could set the tone for criminal justice reforms in New York City and across the country.

While Vance has yet to officially bow out, his fundraising efforts have ground to a halt. He’s faced years of criticism and calls for his resignation because of his seeming deference to the rich and powerful while continuing low-level prosecutions of mostly Black and Brown New Yorkers. A campaign spokeswoman said Vance has not yet made a formal announcement.

Meanwhile, eight candidates have jumped into the race, often focusing on issues of inequity and systemic racism in law enforcement, following the #MeToo movement and the police killing of George Floyd. Two candidates have already committed to cutting the District Attorney’s budget by 50% if elected (Tahanie Aboushi and Eliza Orlins) and, in a telling lightning-round segment at a forum hosted by Color of Change on Wednesday night, five of eight candidates said “yes” when asked if they would “defund the police.” (One candidate, Diana Florence, declined to answer, Tali Farhadian Weinstein and Elizabeth Crotty said “no.”)

Reformers and national advocacy organizations like Color of Change have set their sights on the Manhattan DA’s race as part of a larger effort to support reform-minded prosecutors over the last five years

“[District Attorneys] are some of the most powerful people in the criminal justice system,” said Scott Roberts, senior director of criminal justice campaigns at Color of Change. “What charges a person will receive, whether they will be held pre-trial, recommendations on sentencing, even when cases are being reviewed for parole or probation, prosecutors are often asked to weigh in.”

Local groups are eager to move the needle on the race as well. Five Boro Defenders published a guide to the race they’re calling a Harm Report, with extensive interviews with the candidates.

“What’s at stake here is another decade of locking people up instead of making communities safe,” said Rebecca Heinsen, a public defender and member of Five Boro Defenders. “We want to elect someone who is actually committed to that change, not someone who says the progressive buzzwords but is steeped in regressive punitive policy.”

The Manhattan District Attorney has considerable influence when it comes to police policy and legislation in New York City and beyond, said Jeremy Travis, the executive vice president of criminal justice at the think tank Arnold Ventures.

“This is a platform for a vision for reform if the elected DA wants to exercise it,” Travis said. “All eyes are on Manhattan.”

Who’s Running? A Primer

Tahanie Aboushi

Tahanie Aboushi is a civil rights attorney with her own firm who often introduces herself describing her own experience with the criminal justice system. Her parents, Palestinian immigrants, faced federal charges, and her father spent two decades in federal prison, for trafficking untaxed cigarettes. “I saw first-hand the damage and destruction the prosecution system causes to our communities,” she said at a recent candidate forum. If elected, Aboushi would create a unit to review old sentences to see if supervised release is possible for elderly inmates and people with severe illness. Her office would not seek sentences longer than 20 years and she’s one of two people in the race to commit to decreasing the budget of the DA’s office.

Alvin Bragg

Alvin Bragg is currently a visiting law professor and co-director of the Racial Justice Project at New York Law School. He previously worked in the New York Attorney General’s Office under Eric Schniederman and as an Assistant U.S. Attorney at the Department of Justice during the Obama administration. In an interview with Five Boro Defenders, he was pressed on why he prosecuted “illegal reentry” cases while working for the Justice Department. “I did it because I was in the office, but I think we all have to be accountable for our conduct, and when I think about those cases, I wish I could have done that job without doing them,” he said. He often recalls growing up in Central Harlem,where still lives. “I’m still the 15-year-old kid staring at the other end of the gun on 139th street and 7th Avenue, stopped multiple times by the NYPD,” Bragg said at a recent forum. Bragg is the second biggest fundraiser in the race after Farhadian Weinstein, with more than a million dollars amassed. Some of Bragg’s top priorities as Manhattan District Attorney, would be to end mass incarceration, increase police accountability, and protect tenant rights.

Elizabeth Crotty

Elizabeth Crotty is the only person in the race not running under the progressive banner. She describes herself as a centrist and comes to the race as a criminal defense attorney with her own private firm, where she’s represented people accused of grand larceny, fraud, assault, rape, and driving while intoxicated among other charges. She started her career in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office under former DA Robert M. Morgenthau. She was the only candidate who refused to fill out Color of Change’s candidate questionnaire, that sought answers to how candidates might handle the use of the NYPD gang database, whether they would seek life sentences or prosecute school-based arrests among dozens of other issues. “The facts and context in every case matter,” she said, explaining why she had not taken positions on any of the issues the group asked about.

Tali Farhadian Weinstein

Tali Farahadian Weinstein is a career prosecutor who most recently worked as the general counsel for Eric Gonzalez, the Brooklyn District Attorney. She oversaw the post-conviction Justice Bureau which handles clemency applications and wrongful convictions. Before that she worked as a federal prosecutor under President Obama. Farhadian Weinstein is the best funded candidate in the race, state campaign filings show, having taken in more than $2 million dollars to her campaign coffers. If elected, she plans to accelerate the prosecution of gun crimes by creating a “gun court” to handle all such cases. Frahadian Weinstein immigrated to the U.S. from Iran with her family as a child.

Diana Florence

Diana Florence spent more than two decades as a prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, most recently heading the office’s Construction Fraud Task-Force, before she resigned over allegations that she withheld evidence about a cooperating witness. THE CITY later reported she said she faced bullying and a hostile work environment in Vance’s office and denied withholding evidence. Florence was the lead prosecutor in the conviction of contractors for the death of Carlos Moncayo, a 22-year-old undocumented laborer who was crushed to death at a job site in the Meatpacking District in 2015, a case she often cites on the campaign trail. “I targeted crimes of power not crimes of poverty,” she said at a recent forum, boasting her support from several prominent New York City labor unions.

Lucy Lang

Up until last summer, Lucy Lang was the Director of the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Before that she worked in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, where she handled domestic violence cases, murders, and gun crimes. Her top priorities if elected are to improve reentry programs for people leaving the criminal justice system, improve how sex crimes are handled and to set up an Ombudsman’s office independent of the District Attorney, to handle complaints of prosecutorial misconduct. As District Attorney she would aim to, “[treat] kids like kids, [treat] substance use and mental conditions as health problems,” by diverting cases away from prosecution towards health and community supports and using restorative justice.

Eliza Orlins

Eliza Orlins is the only person in the race who has worked as a public defender, a job she’s held with the Legal Aid Society for the last decade. In interviews with Five Boro Defenders she said she would end all cash bail and make assistant attorneys bring any requests for pre-trial detention to higher ups for approval. Orlins’s top priorities would be to decriminalize sex work and create a conviction integrity unit. If elected she said her office would dramatically reduce the number of prosecutions the Manhattan District Attorney pursues, by, “declining to prosecute the majority of misdemeanors, almost all misdemeanors,” she said at a forum last week, adding her staff is still working to develop a final list of crimes the office would prosecute. Also, perhaps incongruously, she was a contestant on the reality shows “Survivor” and “The Amazing Race.”

Dan Quart

Dan Quart is a State Assemblymember who’s represented the Upper East Side of Manhattan for the last decade. He co-sponsored the state’s bail reform law that ended many forms of cash bail, and fought subsequent efforts to roll the law back. Before joining the State Assembly, he worked as an attorney in private practice. As Manhattan District Attorney his goal is, “not to be another prosecutor, break down and rebuild an office that is not functioning,” he said, adding he would do that by revamping the sex crimes unit, end the use of “surveillance-based” technologies to assist prosecutions, like social media, the NYPD’s gang database and software’s like Palantir. Quart said, if elected, there are 18 crimes he won’t prosecute, which includes charges like loitering, trespassing, resisting arrest and marijuana possession.

The primary election is on June 22nd, with nine days of early voting leading up to it between June 12th and 20th. Ranked choice voting, where you can pick up to five candidates, now in place for city elections, will not be in place for the District Attorney's race because it is a state office.

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