Less Than Total Recall - ProPublica -New York Justice
Vecchione, asked everything from the mundane to the momentous, had answered some version of “I don’t recall” scores of times. Rudin counted them up: 324.
“This is evasive contempt if it happened in front of a judge,” Rudin had asserted several hours into his interrogation.
This week, Rudin asked the federal judge overseeing Collins’ lawsuit to force Vecchione to do better. And he asked the judge to sanction Vecchione and the lawyers for New York City who are representing him if he fails to do so.
“Mr. Rudin appears to be unhappy with the answers Mr. Vecchione gave at his deposition, mainly because those answers undermine his client’s claims in this case,” said Arthur Larkin, senior counsel for the New York City Law Department. “But Mr. Rudin’s disappointment with the testimony does not warrant extending the deposition. We intend to oppose the application and will file our opposition papers today.”
The allegations against Vecchione are some of the most serious in the recent and troubling history of wrongful prosecutions. Vecchione is a senior official in the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office, chief of the office’s rackets division and a featured character in CBS’s television series, “Brooklyn DA.” Collins and his lawyer have accused him of intimidating witnesses and suborning perjury in his prosecution of Collins, and of having then worked to thwart Collins’ effort to challenge that conviction during his years in state prison. More than that, Collins and his lawyer have accused Vecchione’s boss, Brooklyn District Attorney Charles J. Hynes, of having overseen for years an office in which similar misconduct was not only tolerated but rewarded.