Gillio Lopes, one of seven men named in the Jane Doe civil suit out of Cornell, has filed an Article 78 challenge seeking to remove New York Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor in the reopened criminal investigation. His lawyers point to a single document: a post James published on September 28.
(Why the seven men, who haven’t been convicted of anything, were publicly identified but the alleged victim gets to remain anonymous is another funky aspect of this case).
In it, the attorney general wrote that what this young woman was forced to endure is horrific and unacceptable, that she was holding her in her heart and prayers, and that to her and to all ‘survivors’ — ‘you are not alone, we stand with you.’ Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) then appointed her to run the criminal investigation three days later.
Set aside politics entirely and look at this as any practicing lawyer would. A prosecutor’s job is to determine whether a crime occurred and whether the evidence supports charging a specific person. That determination has to be made after reviewing the available evidence, not announced beforehand on social media to make a sociopolitical statement.
The word doing the damage is “survivor.” It isn’t a neutral description. It portends a factual finding — that an assault actually occurred — which is precisely the question the investigation exists to answer. James used it before she had the case, before she had seen the evidence, and about an allegation that the Tompkins County district attorney had already reviewed and declined to charge, citing insufficient evidence of criminal conduct. Agai, nobody has been charged with anything.
If a defense attorney had posted the inverse three days before being appointed to represent these men — ‘this young woman’s story falls apart, I stand with the wrongly accused’ — every ethics board in New York would have an opinion about it by Friday.
The sequence makes it worse. Van Houten looked at the facts and declined. National attention followed the civil filing. Hochul publicly criticized his handling, then installed a replacement who had already signaled where she stood on the case. That is not a correction of a flawed process. It is the substitution of public pressure for prosecutorial judgment, with a prosecutor selected for the conclusion she had already published.
James’s response is that her office enforces the law for all New Yorkers and that she will lead a comprehensive investigation guided only by facts, evidence, and the law. We know that’s BS because this is the same woman who ran for office on a pledge to “get Donald Trump” and then proceeded to invent a case against him and get him convicted in friendly state courts.
Everybody here deserves better. If a crime was committed in that fraternity house, the young woman deserves a prosecution that holds up — built by someone whose public statements can’t be waved around to argue the whole thing was prejudged. If no crime was committed (and she’s changed her story on this aspect of it since the incident) seven men deserve a process that didn’t begin with the state announcing their guilt.
Neither outcome is served by this appointment. A judge hasn’t ruled on the motion yet. He should grant it, assign someone who hasn’t tweeted about the case, and let the evidence decide.
