Criminal defense lawyers seek ex-Suffolk ADA’s ouster from legal profession

By Graham Rayman

A former Suffolk County assistant district attorney should permanently lose his law license over failing to turn over evidence in prior cases, the Innocence Project and a prominent criminal defense lawyer say.

Late in 2020, a state Appellate panel of judges banned the former prosecutor, Glenn Kurtzrock, from practicing law for two years for violating disclosure rules in the prosecution of Messiah Booker for a 2013 home invasion murder.

In their Jan. 20 letter to the Second Department, Nina Morrison of the Innocence Project and defense lawyer Paul Shechtman wrote that the five-judge panel was wrong to say Kurtzrock was not a “repeat” violator of disclosure rules, and asked that he be disbarred.

Kurtzrock similarly withheld 45 items of evidence from defense lawyers in the case of accused killer Shawn Lawrence, according to the letter. Lawrence was later exonerated of murder and freed after serving six years of a 75-year sentence.

“We believed we had an ethical and legal obligation to let the Court know that its assumption that Mr. Kurtzrock had never been found to have committed serious misconduct outside the Booker trial was mistaken,” Morrison said.

 

In their letter, they likened Kurtzrock to a kidnapper who had illegally imprisoned Lawrence and a “rogue prosecutor.”

They asked the judges to reopen the Booker investigation and couple it with a probe into the Lawrence case. “His conduct in Booker was not aberrant,” they wrote.

The Innocence Project also sued in 2019 seeking access to files of four other cases Kurtzrock handled.

Kurtzrock quit the Suffolk DA’s office and acknowledged his responsibility, but pushed for public censure, a lesser penalty than the two-year suspension. He opened a private practice on Long Island.

His law office is now closed and not accepting new clients, according to its website.

A spokesman for the Office of Court Administration declined comment.

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Criminal defense lawyers seek ex-Suffolk ADA’s ouster from legal profession