Three-Year-Old Commission Hochul Tapped for Rochester DA Traffic Stop Has Never Taken a Case

It took the state over a year and a half to staff the commission. It’s supposed to have 11 members, appointed by various branches of state government. The state’s then–chief judge made her appointments in late 2021, and Democratic legislators announced their appointees soon after. But Hochul took until February 2023 to fill three of her four slots and give the commission the quorum it requires to operate.

Then the CPC took another year to hire a top administrator, who only got to drafting the commission’s core rules and procedures this month. Those rules entered a requisite 60-day comment period last week, likely meaning that the earliest the CPC could pick up the Doorley case — and any other complaints that have piled up over the last three years — is late June.

CPC chair Michael Simons did not answer New York Focus’s questions about why it has taken so long for the commission to become operational, nor requests for a timeline for taking up the Doorley case. “We are aware of the Governor’s public statements regarding her referral,” he said in a statement.

Hochul’s office did not respond to questions about her delayed appointments before publication.

Hochul has a history of neglecting appointment responsibilities, particularly when it comes to the criminal justice system. As New York Focus reported in December, seven of nine spots on a governor-appointed board that reviews complaints from jailed people are sitting vacant. Meanwhile, over half of the members of the state Board of Parole, which makes decisions on whether to release people from prison, are serving expired terms. (Even with the zombie commissioners, the parole board is two members shy of its full complement of 19.)

The unfilled vacancies can leave defendants and incarcerated people with virtually no avenue for relief from abuse or misconduct. Advocates have long complained that parole board understaffing leads the body to deny parole more frequently. Meanwhile, the mostly empty jail complaint council spends only seconds reviewing each case, and it rejects almost all of them.

The CPC isn’t the state’s first attempt to rein in problematic prosecutors. The legislature passed a bill creating a prosecutorial misconduct commission in 2018, but the District Attorneys Association of the State of New York (DAASNY) sued to stop it. State courts declared that version of the body unconstitutional.

DAASNY — under Doorley’s leadership — tried to kill the latest iteration of the CPC, too. Then president of the powerful association, Doorley sent a letter to Cuomo in 2021, arguing that the CPC’s establishment would risk “additional wounds to our joint reputations and the public’s perception” amid rising violent crime. She advocated instead to revamp an existing attorney grievance process, in which secretive state committees rarely sanction lawyers.

Doorley’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

How effective the CPC will be at holding prosecutors accountable remains an open question. It’ll likely be more transparent than the current grievance process: Under its proposed rules, the commission would make “the record of its proceedings” publicly available after issuing its final recommendations.