Great Neck native Jesse Friedman on Tuesday filed a motion to have the judge overseeing his petition for a new hearing on his sexual abuse conviction recuse herself from the case, saying the judge has personal connections to Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice.
“[Nassau County Supreme Court] Judge Teresa Corrigan has been a protégé of DA Rice, Jesse Friedman’s principal opponent, since the two practiced law together in the Brooklyn DA’s office over two decades ago,” said Ron Kuby, Friedman’s lawyer. “And Corrigan has been an ‘insider’ in DA Kathleen Rice’s office from when she was handpicked by Rice in 2006 as an Assistant DA, until Corrigan became a judge, with DA Rice’s support, in 2012.”
Kuby said the “black letter of the law” states that “a judge shall disqualify herself in a proceeding in which ‘a lawyer with whom the judge previously practiced law served during such association as a lawyer concerning the matter.”
Shams Tarek, a spokesman for Kathleen Rice, said in a statement “Rice and her prosecutors and investigators are completely independent from the original Friedman prosecution and have spent hundreds of hours performing an exhaustive review of this decades-old case and guilty plea, a review that an independent advisory panel has declared to be as thorough and fair as possible.”
Friedman in June filed a motion to have a new hearing on his 1989 conviction that he and his father, Arnold Friedman, sexually abused young boys enrolled in a computer class in their family’s Great Neck home.
Friedman plead guilty to the charges but upon his release in 2001 said that his confession was coerced from law enforcement officials and that police manipulated false abuse claims from the alleged victims.
Those claims were chronicled in an award-winning documentary “Capturing the Friedmans.”
A report released in 2013 by Rice’s office after a three-year review of the case reaffirmed Friedman’s 1989 conviction. Rice conducted the review of Friedman’s case after a Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in 2010 indicated that some evidence suggested he might have been wrongfully convicted.
Justice Dana Winslow, a state Supreme Court Judge in Mineola, ruled in August that Rice had to hand over “every piece of paper” of Friedman’s case file, with the exception of the victims’ names.
Rice appealed Winslow’s ruling in October.
Friedman and Kuby on Dec. 20 filed a legal brief asking the Appellate Division in Brooklyn to uphold Winslow’s decision.
Kuby said in a December interview that Winslow’s ruling on his and Friedman’s Freedom of Information request “accurately and fairly gave voice to the concerns the defense has always had.” The ruling, he said, was one of the “high points” in Friedman’s attempt to clear his name.
In response to the brief, a spokesman for Rice’s office said in an e-mail “The question here is whether Mr. Friedman, after pleading guilty to and serving time for these very serious crimes, should have access to witness statements and grand jury records that are generally deemed confidential by law – law intended to protect the privacy of crime victims and to keep them from being victimized again.”
