Charles J. Hynes in his office in 2013. Photo: Rick Kopstein/NYLJ.

Charles “Joe” Hynes, whose legacy as Brooklyn's longest-serving district attorney has been marred in recent years by controversies that include the release of dozens of wrongfully convicted defendants that his office helped to imprison, has died. He was 83.

Hynes, Brooklyn born and bred, obtained his J.D. from the St. John's University School of Law in 1961 and took a job with the Legal Aid Society. In 1969, he joined the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office; within a few years rose up the ranks to chief of the office's rackets bureau and, later, first assistant district attorney.

In 1975, Hynes was tapped as a special state prosecutor to investigate abuse crimes in New York's nursing home system. Five years later, Mayor Ed Koch appointed Hynes as the city's fire commissioner.       

Hynes' star rose higher when he was called up in 1987 as a special prosecutor for a case that stoked racial tension in the city: the prosecution of three white men who were part of a mob that attacked a group of black men in Howard Beach, Queens, a predominantly white enclave.

One of the victims, Michael Griffith, died when he tried to flee across the Belt Parkway and was struck by a vehicle, while the other two were severely beaten.

Gov. Mario Cuomo put Hynes on the case after then-Queens District Attorney John Santucci recused himself and Hynes won homicide convictions against the three charged attackers.

With a heightened profile, Hynes made his first successful run for Brooklyn District Attorney in 1989, his first of six.

“He did more before he became district attorney than most people did in a lifetime,” said Arthur Aidala, a criminal defense attorney and past president of the Brooklyn Bar Association who worked under Hynes from 1992 to 1997 and who remained friends with Hynes after he left the office.

Hynes took office in 1990, when a wave of violent crime was washing over the country and New York City saw more than 2,200 murders.

But unlike many of his counterparts across the country who were taking a lock-them-up, throw-away-the-key approach to crime, Hynes implemented programs that provided alternatives to lengthy jail sentences and aimed to get offenders on the right track.   

“When you worked in an office like this you have the feeling that you're just doing the right thing,” said Michael Farkas, a criminal defense attorney and past president of the Kings County Criminal Bar Association who worked under Hynes from 1994 to 2003. “We didn't feel pressure to be quote-unquote tougher on crime because the alternative programs that were in effect made sense.”

Not long after he was sworn in, Hynes' office established one of the country's first alternative treatment program for non-violent defendants charged with drug crimes, the Drug Treatment Alternatives to Prison program. At the time, when Brooklyn was a leading example of urban crime run amok, the idea was considered to be “doing something crazy,” Aidala said.

Now, Aidala said, programs that steer drug offenders toward treatment programs are de rigueur in prosecutors' offices and courts across the United States.

Another pioneering achievement of the Brooklyn DA's office under Hynes, Aidala said, is the establishment of a domestic violence unit, which was driven in part by Hynes' own experiences seeing his mother get physically abused by his father.

Through Hynes' 23-year tenure, crime rates plunged in Brooklyn and throughout the city as a whole, and Brooklyn itself saw a massive economic resurgence.

“He was part of the team that turned Brooklyn around and I think the statistics bear that out,” Aidala said.  

In the beginning years of the 21st century, the science around DNA evidence was advancing, as was the public's awareness of it, and law enforcement agencies and the courts were getting a better understanding the effects—and prevalence of—false confessions being used to secure convictions.

Farkas, who worked in the Brooklyn DA's homicide bureau, said that around this time, Hynes called on prosecutors to flag cases that relied on witness testimony without corroboration and where DNA evidence could be reviewed with modern technologies.

Near the end of his tenure, Hynes established a dedicated unit to review the integrity of past convictions.  

But, leading up to the 2013 elections, controversies began to mount and Hynes began to lose some of his goodwill with voters and his efforts to review old cases came under fresh scrutiny.

In 2010, U.S. District Judge Dora Irizarry of the Eastern District vacated a 1995 murder conviction for Jabbar Collins secured by Hynes' office and, in Collins' civil suit, U.S. District Judge Frederic Block said that Hynes was “deliberately indifferent” to prosecutorial misconduct.

Hynes had also been dogged for years with allegations that he took a soft approach in prosecuting sex abuse cases against members of Brooklyn's Orthodox Jewish community, though Hynes denied that characterization and touted aggressive prosecutions against members of the community, such as a 103-year prison sentence for a man who was convicted of molesting a teenage girl over a period of years, as evidence to the contrary.

Kenneth Thompson, then an attorney in private practice, emerged in 2013 as a primary challenger to Hynes, a Democrat.

From there a bitter race ensued, and the broadsides from Thompson included criticism that Hynes wasn't giving his conviction review unit the resources it needed.

Thompson beat Hynes in the Democratic primary and again in the general election. From the time that Thompson took office until he died from cancer in 2016 before he could finish his term, the office worked to free 20 people who were convicted under Hynes. Eric Gonzalez took over the office after Thompson's death was elected district attorney in 2017.

“Mr. Hynes was a lifelong public servant who devoted his life to the borough he loved,” Gonzalez said in a news release.

Hynes' failed 2013 reelection bid spawned other controversies.

In 2014, the city's Department of Investigation released a report stating that Hynes used $220,000 in forfeiture money to pay a media consultant to help him with his campaign, which triggered an investigation by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York.

Ultimately, though, the U.S. Attorney's Office did not pursue charges against Hynes.  

In recent months, Hynes and some of his former top staffers were hit with fines from the New York City Conflict of Interest Board for their conduct during the election.

Hynes himself agreed to pay $40,000 to settle an inquiry into whether he improperly used his government email account for campaign purposes.

In the years after Hynes left office, Aidala said that the former DA was upset by wrongful convictions that happened under his watch and was often frustrated with how his time in office was portrayed. But, Aidala noted, Hynes left office because Brooklyn voters sent him packing.

“He didn't leave the office in scandal,” Aidala said.

Farkas said that, with regard to the convictions secured under Hynes that have later been thrown out by his successors, that much of the blame should be laid at the feet of individual prosecutors rather than Hynes himself.

“The wrongful convictions, in my estimation, are more so the result of human imperfections and, in some cases, individual malice, than the product of Joe Hynes' supposed corruption,”

He added: “That being said, he bears the responsibility for these tragedies.”  

Hynes is survived by his wife Patricia, three sons and two daughters.

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