A federal judge bashed Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes for turning a blind eye to prosecutorial misconduct that wrongly threw a man in prison for 15 years for the murder of a rabbi.
Federal Judge Frederic Block tore into Hynes at a pretrial hearing for a $150 million civil suit filed by Jabbar Collins, who was wrongly convicted after he was prosecuted by Assistant District Attorney Michael Vecchione.
“Hynes hasn’t treated this seriously,” Block said, referring to allegations that Vecchione threatened two witnesses in the murder probe with violence and withheld exculpatory evidence.
“There are some serious things that Vecchione did here that Hynes appears to approve,” Block said, vowing that “all of this is going to be uncovered” at trial.
Collins allegedly gunned down a Williamsburg rabbi in 1995. Law-enforcement sources still think he’s guilty of the murder, but he was released in 2010 after the prosecutorial misconduct was exposed.
Vecchione is now head of rackets for the district attorney’s office.