Ex-Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes says the darnedest things when forced to testify under oath.
In a sworn deposition, Hynes admitted that material witnesses were held in hotels overnight as “prisoners” — a controversial practice that he repeatedly denied during 2013’s reelection campaign.
“You would go to a jail or go to a hotel room . . . typically the stay, as I understood it, was an overnight stay and then they would testify and that would be the end of it,” Hynes said in a Dec. 19 deposition in a $150 million wrongful-conviction lawsuit.
“They were not free to leave; so sure, they were prisoners,” Hynes said.
That statement is in stark contrast to what Hynes said in June at a candidate forum where he debated with Kenneth Thompson, who ultimately won the election.
“We have never held anyone against their will. We work through the material-witness process and that means a witness is brought before a judge forthwith, or as soon as can be,” Hynes said at the forum.
During the same forum, Thompson blasted the hotel program as “truly frightening” and “insane.”
Hynes’ more recent statement came during a deposition in the lawsuit brought by Jabbar Colllins, who spent 16 years in prison for killing a Brooklyn rabbi before the conviction was thrown out by a federal judge.
On Thursday, Hynes told the Daily News that there was nothing inconsistent about his two remarks.
“They weren’t held against their will by us; the judge signs the material witness warrant and you put them in a hotel overnight under supervision,” he said. “That’s the way it was done.”
Material witness warrants are signed by a judge after prosecutors show there is reasonable cause to believe the witness will not answer a subpoena to take the witness stand in a criminal case.
Hynes said the program was misunderstood and blamed Collins’ lawyer, Joel Rudin, for the criticism, while calling him “delusional.”
Rudin fired back, saying, “Forced to testify under oath, he finally admitted the truth.”
The case against Collins imploded after key witness, Angel Santos, revealed in Brooklyn Federal Court in 2010 that the chief prosecutor, Michael Vecchione, had threatened to bash him over the head with a coffee table or charge him with perjury if he did not take the stand against Collins.
Santos had spent a week in a Bronx jail and then a week in a Queens hotel under armed guard with the door chained shut.
A “hotel log” maintained by the DA’s office in the 1990s listed dozens of witnesses held at hotels, many for more than one night, The News reported in 2013.
Collins spent 16 years in prison for fatally shooting Rabbi Abraham Pollack in a 1994 robbery in Williamsburg.
Federal Judge Dora Irizarrry tossed out the conviction citing “shameful” prosecutorial misconduct by prosecutors, including the failure to inform Collins’ trial lawyer that three key witnesses had recanted or been held prisoner in a hotel before taking the stand.
In an even bigger flip-flop, The News reported this week that Hynes admitted in the deposition that he believed Collins was not guilty of the murder when the conviction was tossed out — even though one of his prosecutors told the judge the DA’s office still believed he was guilty of the murder.
A spokesman for Thompson did not say whether it still uses hotels for material witnesses.
“A material-witness order requires a district attorney to bring a witness directly to court. Our policy is to adhere to such orders,” the spokesman said.
