14 January 2022: Opinion - Albany County DA Soares Should Have Charged Cuomo

Soares should’ve charged Cuomo: His dismissal smells of politics

Albany County District Attorney David Soares' choice to drop forcible touching misdemeanor charges against Andrew M. Cuomo may have been tainted with political considerations according to this op-ed by Wendy Murphy, a Boston-based women's rights activist. In the following excerpt, she argues Soares engaged in sex discrimination by dropping the case:

Last October, when Albany Sheriff Craig Apple filed a misdemeanor criminal charge of “forcible touching” against disgraced former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, he did so without the district attorney’s advance knowledge or approval. Many people rightly interpreted the move as a sign that the sheriff and the DA, David Soares, did not agree about pursuing the case. By taking unilateral steps against Cuomo, Apple was letting us all know that Soares was opposed to prosecution, and that Apple saw this decision as unacceptable.

Soares’ decision to drop the case last week was based on politics, not law.

When Soares made his announcement, he accompanied it with the predictable and offensive statement that he remained “deeply troubled by allegations like the ones at issue here” and considered the complainant “cooperative and credible.” He simultaneously said the evidence was not strong enough to win a conviction: “we cannot meet our burden at trial.”

In a case where the only evidence is the word of one woman, a prosecutor who says something like this is essentially saying the word of a woman is not good enough. Such prosecutors should be impeached, or at least voted out of office at the next election.

District attorneys have wide discretion to pursue or not pursue charges, but they are forbidden to discriminate, and they can be sued for declining to pursue a case based on race, sex or other protected classes. A prosecutor who says a woman is credible and simultaneously refuses to file charges is engaging in sex discrimination because no prosecutor can know in advance what a jury might conclude about a credible victim’s testimony.

The incident of forcible touching involving state government employee Brittany Commisso was the most serious of all the allegations of sexual harassment involving Andrew M. Cuomo's personal conduct. As more becomes known of the situation, Soares' strange choice to drop the charges appears more and more inconsistent with his public statements about their credibility. It also appears more and more likely a pro-Cuomo fix was in.