Orthodox Abuse Suspects Get Exemption
I don’t understand how this can be acceptable. If someone does understand, kindly enlighten me. I wonder if this exemption has been applied to other ‘tight-knit and insular’ communities, because there are a bunch of them in NYC.
Added emphasis mine.
[…] Rejecting a Forward request under the state’s Freedom of Information Law, the Brooklyn district attorney made the startling claim that Orthodox Jews deserve a blanket exemption from the usual public disclosure rules. Prosecutors claimed that Orthodox Jews are ‘unique’ in that releasing the names of suspects would allow others in the community to identify their victims.
‘The circumstances here are unique,’ Assistant District Attorney Morgan Dennehy wrote in an April 16 letter to the Forward. ‘Because all of the requested defendant names relate to Hasidic men who are alleged to have committed sex crimes against Hasidic victims within a very tight-knit and insular Brooklyn community, there is a significant danger that the disclosure of the defendants’ names would lead members of that community to discern the identities of the victims.’ […]
Hynes even refused to name 14 Orthodox people who were convicted of sex crimes, 10 of whom pleaded guilty.Dennehy cited the state’s civil rights laws in denying the Forward’s request for the names of 85 Orthodox Jews arrested on sex charges during the past three years. The Forward made its request in December 2011 after prosecutors announced that scores of Orthodox Jews had been charged under a special program designed to encourage the community to come forward with information.
He did not explain whether prosecutors had concluded that there was anything specific about each of the 85 suspects that might make it possible for others to determine the identity of their victim from the identity of the suspect.
He also did not explain whether such a blanket exemption might be granted to other similarly ‘tight-knit’ communities in the borough. And there were no details about what criteria prosecutors would use to determine whether a particular group should be granted such preferential status. […]
When Hynes last year trumpeted the arrests of 85 Orthodox Jews on sex crimes charges since 2009, he again refused to release the suspects’ names.
He cited the need to protect the identity of victims. Yet that same week, Hynes issued a press release publicizing the name of a non-Jewish man convicted of raping his girlfriend’s daughter. Hynes released the man’s name, the neighborhood where he lived and the victim’s age, enough information for any neighbor to identify the girl.
Hynes even refused to name 14 Orthodox people who were convicted of sex crimes, 10 of whom pleaded guilty. They were sentenced to between one month and 20 years in jail. Although some of those cases were covered in the media, several were adjudicated without public scrutiny.
