Former Queens state judge turned district attorney candidate Gregory Lasak has seen a recent manslaughter conviction secured in his courtroom reversed on appeal, after the panel found he failed to properly handle concerns of racial bias in a move that kept a prospective juror who was black off the case.

The reversal and remittance for a new trial in Queens Supreme Court comes during the early days of Lasak's bid to replace Richard Brown, who announced last week he wouldn't run for re-election as DA.

The case also implicates echoes of ethical questions raised by court observers and defense attorneys about family members of judges on the bench in Queens appearing in that same court as prosecutors, even as the DA's office casts the concerns as the unfair leveling of harmful accusations.

On Jan. 9, a panel for the Supreme Court Appellate Division, Second Department reversed convictions on charges of first-degree manslaughter and second-degree weapon possession conviction for Diamonte Alexander. The panel—composed of Justices Ruth Balkin, Cheryl Chambers, Jeffrey Cohen and Robert Miller—found that Lasak erred by not following the standard review process to ensure the move by the prosecutor in the case, who the DA's office identified as ADA Rachel Buchter, to block a prospective juror was made for sufficiently race-neutral reasons.

Alexander was found guilty by a jury in 2016 for the November 2012 slaying, at the age of 18, of a young man in Rockaway, Queens. The conviction Buchter secured against Alexander in 2016 came after an initial trial the previous year resulted in a hung jury. According to reports at the time, Buchter was the prosecutor on that trial as well.

According to the appellate panel, Alexander alleged on appeal that, during jury selection, the prosecution sought to exclude a potential juror “based solely on the potential juror's race.”

Alexander's attorneys appeared to challenge the prosecutors' move as discriminatory in nature. The prosecution responded that it “believed this potential juror to be too young and inexperienced to serve on a murder trial,” the panel wrote.

“The court allowed for further questioning of this potential juror and, based on this additional questioning, determined that the potential juror seemed to have difficulty understanding the questions posed to him, that he appeared to have 'a glazed-eye look,' and that his 'ability to communicate is somewhat impaired,'” the panel stated, adding that Lasak “then allowed the prosecutor to exercise a peremptory challenge against the potential juror, deeming the peremptory challenge to be not 'in any way based on any discrimination.'”

The problem, the appeals court indicated, was that Lasak didn't apply the proper three-step test to make sure a potential juror wasn't being blocked for impermissible discriminatory reasons, under the test established under the U.S. Supreme Court's 1986 decision in Batson v. Kentucky, which New York courts follow. Lasak failed to rule on the initial Batson challenges raised by Alexander's defense.

“Under these circumstances, the Supreme Court failed in its duty to determine whether the prosecutor's race-neutral explanations were credible,” the panel stated before remanding the case to Queens for a retrial.

It's rare to see a successful appeal of a court's handling of Batson challenges, according to Brooklyn Law School professor Jocelyn Simonson, partly because such challenges are routine parts of the jury selection process.

“It's one of the only points in the everyday criminal-procedure process where the question of racial discrimination is actively litigated,” she said.

She went on to note that, when correctly done, the issue judges are facing is not, “can I see, myself, a reason why this juror is not qualified? The question is, did the prosecutor or the defense attorney use intentional racial discrimination when they used a peremptory challenge to strike that person,” Simonson said.

The results, she pointed out, may have ultimately been the same—that juror may have not been allowed to serve—but that wasn't the issue with which the appellate panel was concerned.

“Most judges do all three steps,” Simonson said. “It's very rare to see a judge overturned in this way.”

Lasak is no stranger to being met with disagreement by appellate panels. The New York Law Journal reviewed cases on appeal and found more than a dozen convictions secured in Lasak's courtroom since 2010 being upset, including Alexander's.

In 2016, for example, the Second Department reversed a manslaughter conviction in People v. Singh over the trial court's failure to instruct the jury it could reach a self-defense conclusion. In 2013, the Second Department reversed a murder conviction based on a pattern of prosecutor misconduct in People v. Singleton. And in 2010, Lasak was found to have wrongly directed sentences for first-degree manslaughter and third-degree weapon possession to run consecutively in People v. Poux.

Lasak did not respond to multiple requests for comment made through a spokesman.

The appeal in Alexander's case also spotlighted another issue that has raised concerns for Queens court observers. As the Law Journal reported in August, members of the Queens defense bar and other court-watchers have raised questions about the number of assistant DAs in the Queens office who count judges on the bench in the borough courts as family members—a unique situation among city prosecutors.

ADA Buchter, the prosecutor in the Alexander case, is one such person: she is the daughter of Supreme Court Justice Richard Buchter.

Members of DA Brown's staff argue that concerns over the appearance of judges' children before their colleagues in the same court are unfounded, calling the suggestions unfortunate and damaging. Executive Assistant District Attorney Robert Masters said the office was seeking leave to appeal the appellate court's reversal.

“I would have thought the Law Journal would have been more focused on the legal precedent created in the Alexander decision, rather than the genealogy of the trial assistant,” he said in a statement later provided to the Law Journal. “Significantly, the error at the heart of the matter's reversal was not one committed by Ms. Buchter, a very talented and ethical prosecutor, but an alleged one, ascribed to the trial judge—an error that the office will seek to rectify on appeal.”

New York Law School professor Rebecca Roiphe, herself a former state prosecutor, said issues like Batson challenges are already fraught with sensitive concerns that judges have to carefully confront all the time, and how they're handled needs to assure all those involved that everyone starts with a level playing field.

“They're the kinds of issues that, on their own, could call into question not just the legitimacy of a particular prosecution, but of the entire criminal justice system,” she said. “You throw one little extra thing into the story, like the prosecutor is a child of a colleague on the bench, and because it's so precarious to start with, because these issues by their nature bring up such sensitive questions, that it's a good example of how what seems like an innocuous thing can sow discord throughout the entire process.”