Mayer Herskovic, flanked by his lawyer Donna Aldea, stops to answer questions inside Brooklyn Supreme Court after a hearing on Thursday. Photo: Jason Grant/NYLJ

Standing in a courthouse hallway on Thursday, Mayer Herskovic, the Hasidic Jewish man recently acquitted—post-trial—of taking part in a gang-assault on a black man, spoke haltingly at times about how the attack and his headline-grabbing conviction had shredded his life.

A reserved man by nature, he appeared to be still shaken as he talked quietly about losing his marriage, his job, his good health and his reputation, after a judge convicted him at a bench trial last year.

The brutal 2013 attack, in which some 20 Hasidic Jewish men in Williamsburg jumped and beat down Taj Patterson, partially blinding him, became another flash point in the long-fraught divide between Brooklyn's Hasidic and African-American communities.

Herskovic—no longer a convict facing four years in prison, now that an Appellate Division, Second Department panel on Oct. 10 reversed his conviction on the facts—also talked about the anxiety brought on by two separate civil lawsuits lodged against him and others by Patterson, at least one of which survives now and is being pressed vigorously.

Then Herskovic made a plea, in a Law Journal interview on Thursday, as he asked publicly that Patterson drop him from the civil lawsuits and their allegations.

“I would like him to drop it,” Herskovic said of the civil claims against him. “But, I mean, I cannot tell him what to do.”

“All I can say is, I really feel for him,” the 25-year-old Herskovic went on, standing with his arms folded in front of him and wearing a plain black suit and white collared shirt. “I got justice served,” he said. “It's been a long time, but I got it. And he did not get justice, and I don't think he will ever get justice served for him,” Herskovic added, referring to the fact that, of the four other accused Patterson assailants, two had their criminal charges dropped, and the other two pleaded out and got no prison time.

The Second Department panel, in its sweeping decision, ruled that at Herskovic's trial before Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Danny Chun, the “weight of the evidence” did not favor a finding of guilt. The unanimous panel wrote that “under the circumstances of this case, including [Patteron's] inability to positively identify any of his attackers, the varying accounts regarding the incident, and the DNA evidence, which was less than convincing,” Herskovic's guilt was not established beyond a reasonable doubt.

Justices Reinaldo Rivera, Leonard Austin, Jeffrey Cohen and Betsy Barros also questioned the “high-sensitivity” DNA evidence presented against Herskovic.

The panel's ruling was a rare instance of an appeals court using its independent factual-review power to reverse a conviction on the facts—here, supplanting the determination of a judge who had heard testimony and seen evidence. The ruling meant that the underlying indictment against Herskovic was dismissed, and he cannot be retried. It would be double jeopardy.

But in Patterson's two civil lawsuits—one in state court and one in federal court—the injured gay black man, a student at the time of the attack, is seeking compensatory and punitive damages. No amount is specified in the suits, but given the nature of what appeared to be a race-motivated attack, and the blindness he has suffered, any verdict could be a large one.

The federal lawsuit, though—which was brought against the city of New York and five accused Patterson assailants, including Herskovic—has been dismissed against the defendants. It alleged civil-rights violations.

Still, Patterson and his lawyer, Andrew Stoll of Stoll, Glickman & Bellina, have an appeal pending over the dismissal.

The state lawsuit is very much alive, against Herskovic and the other accused assailants. It brings allegations of assault and battery against the five men, and unlike the federal suit, New York City is not named. Herskovic has a default judgment against him in the state lawsuit because he never answered it, but his attorney, Donna Aldea of Barket Epstein Kearon Aldea and LoTurco, said on Thursday that she will move to vacate the default judgment based on the post-trial acquittal of her client.

On Thursday evening, Stoll, Patterson's lawyer, said that he and his client have no intention of dropping Herskovic from either of their civil suits. Patterson has made clear at trial, and otherwise, that he believes Herskovic was at the chaotic 2013 attack, at some point. And at least one judge, Chun, has believed there was enough evidence to convict Herskovic.

Instead of contemplating withdrawing claims against Herskovic, an out-of-work construction worker hoping to find a job, Stoll made his own plea: He asked that Herskovic actually help Patterson gather evidence to make his civil actions stronger and to help convince the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office to bring more criminal actions against other men.

“Taj is going to continue to pursue every avenue available to him, to remedy what happened,” Stoll said in a phone interview. “And if Mr. Herskovic wants to help with that effort, we welcome it.”

“I have 100 percent confidence that he knows far more about what happened at that scene than what I know, even if through hearsay,” he said.

Aldea on Friday declined to comment on Stoll publicly asking for Herskovic's help with the civil suits and potential criminal actions. But in the Brooklyn Supreme Court hallway on Thursday—shortly after she and her client attended a hearing to tie up certain post-appellate-ruling matters—she made clear what she believed to be the important lesson of Herskovic's acquittal.

“This reversal here should be a really strong wake-up call to all of us, that you cannot and should not be permitted, based on a misunderstanding of science, to create the illusion of scientific evidence, when none really exists,” Aldea said.

“And that's what happened in this case,” she continued. “This was touted as a DNA case. But there was no DNA match in this case. … What there was here, was a statistical analysis that was based on non-DNA evidence that was a couple of skin cells on the outer heel of the sneaker that was exposed to the entire outside world, and that created the nondeducible mixture, which means a mixture from which no deduction can be made.”

The Second Department's decision noted that only a small amount of DNA was used in the testing, after some DNA was scraped from a shoe found near the crime scene. The justices also wrote that the “high-sensitivity” DNA analysis used by the Chief Medical Examiner's Office had been developed by OCME to analyze DNA samples that were smaller than the minimum DNA amount—100 picograms—needed for traditional testing. Then they pointed out that an OCME criminologist had “admitted” at trial that in developing high-sensitivity testing, OCME had “tweaked the protocols” of DNA testing.

Further, they wrote that the DNA was found to be a “nondeductible mixture.” That meant, they wrote, that it contained the DNA of two or more persons. And they said that OMCE's “likelihood ratio” result of 133—the number indicating how likely it was that Herskovic was one of the two contributors to the sneaker's DNA—was “a relatively insubstantial number.”

Aldea said that the high-sensitivity DNA evidence in Herskovic's case “was the only evidence that was used to convict a man of a crime, of a felony, and to arrest him and take him away from his family.”

Said Herskovic on Thursday, while standing beside his lawyer in the 19th-floor hallway and speaking of the recent years in his life, “It wasn't easy. … I lost everything.”

Then, he paused and said, “I hope to start anew.”