The botched prosecutions are starting to add up.
In the latest multimillion-dollar lawsuit to follow a case allegedly bungled by Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes’ office, a man who spent a year in jail for a robbery he didn’t commit is suing the city for $15 million in Brooklyn federal court.
Ronald Bozeman, 66, was busted for a $9,000 armed heist outside a bank near Atlantic Terminal in 2011 after victims testified that he was the gunman.
But the shaky witnesses later changed their story and told a second grand jury that another man was actually the assailant.
Despite the discrepancy, Bozeman was charged with the crime and spent a year in jail before a Brooklyn Supreme Court judge tossed the case in December.
“This prosecution has been a fiasco,” wrote Bozeman attorney Mark Bederow in a 2012 letter to the Brooklyn DA before the case was tossed.
In the suit, Bozeman’s attorneys argue that Hynes staffers were coaching witnesses to tailor their testimony against him without regard for the facts.
“Over a long period of time, the [DA’s office] has engaged in an unlawful office-wide policy, culture and practice of aggressively flaunting the constitutions of the United States and the state of New York,” the suit claims.
Bozeman’s suit blasts both the Brooklyn DA and the NYPD, alleging comprehensive ineptitude.
“The conduct of the NYPD and the [DA’s office] in the within case is part of an ongoing pattern of corruption, indifference and ineptitude that is the result of a system-wide lack of proper training, guidance and supervision,” the suit maintains.
Bozeman’s case is just the latest black eye for the beleaguered Hynes as he tries to steady himself for a bruising re-election campaign.
Jabbar Collins — who spent 15 years in prison for the murder of a rabbi before a judge set him free, citing prosecutorial missteps by Hynes staff — is suing the city for $150 million.
He was freed after Brooklyn DA staffers were found to have coerced witnesses and withheld evidence from the defense.
Collins’ lawyer, Joel Rudin, has also alleged that prosecutors for Hynes, who has been DA since 1989, used hotel rooms as private jail cells to hide away reluctant witnesses and coerce them into giving false testimony.
“Hynes’ office was running a private jail system where witnesses were illegally interrogated and forcibly detained indefinitely,” Rudin wrote in a federal-court filing.
Four men charged with raping and pimping a young Orthodox Jewish woman also saw their charges dropped last June after Brooklyn prosecutors failed to disclose that their accuser took back her accusations.
In March, David Ranta, 58, was freed after 22 years behind bars after Hynes’ integrity unit found he was wrongfully prosecuted as a result of shoddy police work.
Hynes argues that many of the reversals were initiated by internal investigations into wrongdoing.