A look at Manhattan D.A. candidates on the ballot in June’s primary election
Most years, the race of district attorneys is not the subject of political chatter but like everything else about this election cycle - nothing is typical.
For starters, the race for Manhattan D.A. is crowded with eight candidates in the mix after Cyrus Vance, Jr., announced he would not seek reelection.
Following the guilty verdict of former Minneapolis Officer Derek Chauvin in the murder of George Floyd, the candidates addressed the urgent need for criminal justice reform with some offering more progressive agendas than others.
The other big questions: how will they handle the Trump investigation that currently in the midst of being investigated by Vance and his team.
The Brooklyn D.A. is also up for reelection and the incumbent, Eric Gonzalez is running but to date, no one is challenging him according to state campaign records.
Tahanie Aboushi, 35
— Democrat
— Graduate of St. John’s University and Syracuse University College of Law
— Civil rights attorney and Palestinian immigrant, whose parents were arrested on charges related to untaxed cigarettes, and whose father was sentenced to more than two decades in prison when she was 14. She is also the founding partner of The Aboushi Law Firm.
— Resident of Harlem
— Supports the decriminalization of sex work, and plans to hold ICE officers accountable for misconduct and bring in immigration attorneys to better understand the impact of charges on immigration status.
Alvin Bragg, 47
— Democrat
— Graduate of Harvard University and Harvard Law School
— Former New York Chief Deputy Attorney General and federal prosecutor, now Co-Director of the Racial Justice Project at New York Law School
— Resident of Harlem
— Supports reforms to end mass incarceration, and overhaul the DA’s scandal-plagued sex-crimes unit.
Liz Crotty, 50
— Democrat
— Graduate of Fordham Law School
— Former prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office Investigation Division turned criminal defense attorney. She is currently a partner at Crotty Saland PC.
— Resident of Chelsea
— Supports waiving court fees for the poorest defendants and establishing job and counseling programs to reduce recidivism.
Diana Florence, 50
— Democrat
— Graduate of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and University of North Carolina School of Law
— Former prosecutor for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office who served as the head of the Construction Fraud Task Force
— Resident of Kips Bay
— Supports Carlos’ Law, which would impose higher fines on corporations that endanger workers.
Lucy Lang, 39
— Democrat
— Graduate of Swarthmore College and Columbia Law School
— Former prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office who also served as Director of the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
— Resident of Harlem
— Supports the decriminalization of sex work and the creation of a prosecutorial ombudsman, where an independent lawyer will investigate cases of potential prosecutorial misconduct. She also wants to create a specialized gun court to handle all gun crime and possession cases.
Eliza Orlins, 38
— Democrat
— Graduate of Syracuse University and Fordham Law School
— A Manhattan public defender who has represented more than 3,000 people and has amassed a large Twitter following.
— Resident of Chelsea
— Supports discontinuing the prosecution of low-level offenses resulting from addiction, homelessness, mental illness and poverty, and reducing the city’s jail and state’s prison populations.
Dan Quart, 48
— Democrat
— Graduate of SUNY Binghamton and St. John’s School of Law
— A New York State assemblyman who previously worked as a pro-bono attorney.
— Resident of Upper East Side
— Says he’ll overhaul the DA’s sex crimes unit, and will decline to prosecute a host of low-level offenses that primarily affect Black, Latino and low-income New Yorkers.
Tali Farhadian Weinstein, 45
— Democrat
— Graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School. She was also a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University.
— General Counsel to the Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez, taught at New York University School of Law, and served as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Merrick Garland. Also served as Counsel to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder during the Obama Administration.
— Resident of Upper East Side
— Plans to create a new Bureau of Gender-Based Violence, which will be comprised of a Sex Crimes Unit and Domestic Violence Unit, as well as an Environmental Crimes Unit to prosecute corporate polluters.
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