Great Neck native Jesse Friedman has filed a motion for either a hearing to reconstruct the record of his 27-year sex abuse conviction or dismiss the charges against him, according to court documents filed July 21.
Friedman’s spokesperson Lonnie Soury said in a statement that the Nassau County District Attorney’s office said they lost the records pertaining to the specific charges Friedman pled guilty to in 1988.
The defense said in the court documents that during a Jan. 13 hearing, assistant DA Robert Schwartz said “We know the charges to which Mr. Friedman pled guilty, we don’t have a way to correspond them to the actual counts in the indictments.”
Friedman, who along with his father Arnold Friedman was arrested and pleaded guilty in 1988 to sexually abusing boys enrolled in a computer class in his family’s Great Neck home, was granted a hearing on his claims of actual innocence in September.
He was released on parole in 2001 and soon retracted on his guilty plea, saying his confession was coerced from law enforcement officials and that police manipulated false abuse claims from the alleged victims.
When he filed last year to have his claim of innocence heard, he included a motion for acting state Supreme Court Justice Teresa Corrigan to recuse herself from the case, arguing she is a close friend of former District Attorney Kathleen Rice, who in 2013 had reaffirmed Friedman’s conviction after a three-year review of the case.
The review was conducted after a Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in 2010 indicated that some evidence suggested Friedman might have been wrongfully convicted.
“During the ‘exhaustive’ and ‘comprehensive’ reinvestigation, no one at the Nassau County DA’s office bothered to perform the literal first step in conviction integrity review: determine the charges of which the defendant was convicted,” the motion filed last week read.
In June Corrigan recused herself from presiding over Friedman’s actual innocence case, reversing an earlier decision to not recuse herself.
Corrigan said in her filing recusing herself that Joseph Onorato, one of the original prosecutors in the Friedman case, may be called to testify at the upcoming hearing. Corrigan wrote that while she believes she can fairly evaluate him as a witness, she was also Onorato’s supervisor for a time in the county district attorney’s office.
She also said that the appointment of Robert Schwartz, the lead prosecutor in the case until recently, as a judge about a month ago could cause issues. Corrigan wrote she could foresee an argument that she may feel compelled to support Schwartz’s positions made as a prosecutor.
Rice had agreed to a court hearing on claims made by Friedman that he was innocent before she resigned as district attorney in January after being elected to Congress in November. She said at the time she believed Friedman’s original guilty conviction should still be upheld.
The DA’s office said in a statement they will review the new motion.
“An exhaustive review by the District Attorney’s office, guided by an independent panel of experts, confirmed the propriety of Friedman’s guilty plea,” the DA’s office said in a statement. “We will review and respond to Mr. Kuby’s latest motion.”
If a record reconstruction hearing were granted, the defense wrote in the documents, the court could say that so many record are missing the charges against Friedman should be dismissed or that the DA’s office is at fault for losing the records.
Soury wrote in the statement that of the 244 charges lodged against him, Friedman plead guilty to 26.
“The indictments were not specific as to time, place, victims or witnesses, purposefully, because they were made of whole cloth, the product of a national hysteria regarding false allegations of mass sexual abuse,” Friedman’s attorney Ronald Kuby said in a statement. “Now, as we seek to prove Jesse Friedman was innocent of the crimes he was coerced to plead to, the DA claims to have lost the only record of what those charges were.”
Friedman’s claims of innocence were chronicled in the Academy Award-nominated documentary “Capturing the Friedmans,” directed by Andrew Jarecki in 2003.
