If you’re charged with a felony in New York City, there is only a 1 percent chance you’ll ever go on trial. And if you do, you’ll want to be in the Bronx and not Staten Island.
Bronx prosecutors scored convictions in just 49 percent of felony trials — far behind the overall city rate of 67 percent, according to a Post review of state data between January 2015 and May 2017.
The number came as no surprise to Stephanie Saldaña-Sanchez, who watched in horror last March as a judge found her son’s accused killer not guilty in a bench trial.
“Wow. I feel like the whole system has failed,” she told the Post, still grieving the loss of her 21-year-old Air Force veteran son, a bystander gunned down by a gang-banger on a Bronx stoop in 2012.
Defendants fared far worse in Staten Island, where they got convicted at an 85 percent clip. Still, only a fraction of accused felons there made it to trial — 41 cases out of 7,713 arrests.
Citywide, only 1.2 percent of the 195,657 adults arrested for felonies — or 2,262 — had their cases resolved by a judge or jury.
That’s a shame, said one policing expert, since detectives would be better at locking down cases if more of their arrests made it to a courtroom.
“There would be better witnesses, better evidence collection, and a better long view of the case,” said Eugene O’ Donnell, an ex-NYPD cop and John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor. “If 99 percent of the cases you investigate never go to trial, you don’t know the quality of your cases.
“I know many a detective who came back licking his wounds after he was humiliated in court,” O’Donnell added. “Only after you’ve actually been on trial do you get a sense of the gaps, and the things to look for.”
The Post review of state data showed:
- 57 percent of accused felons took plea bargains, before or during trials. Manhattan prosecutors were most likely to make a deal, with a rate of 66 percent. Brooklyn and the Bronx were tied for the lowest rate, at 52 percent.
- 31 percent of all felony cases get dismissed. Brooklyn had the highest rate of dismissal, at 39 percent, while Manhattan had the lowest, 26 percent.
- In 8 percent of felony cases, city prosecutors declined to bring charges after an arrest. The Bronx DA’s office declined to prosecute the most, 15 percent, while Manhattan prosecutors declined the least, 4 percent.
Experts have long suspected that Bronx juries’ skepticism of police factors into the low numbers.
“If the case relies solely on police officer testimony, I would say [a defendant’s] chances of prevailing are better than a coin flip,” said Troy Smith, a defense attorney who first spent 10 years as a Bronx prosecutor.
The Bronx DA’s office said it does not measure success solely on its conviction rate at trial.
“We strive to obtain the best outcome for the victims and the people of the Bronx in every case, and often a plea is the better route to take instead of going to trial,” the statement said.
The office added that part of its job is diverting defendants with drug addiction and mental-health problems out of the courts and into treatment.
But a low trial-conviction rate is still a cause for concern, O’Donnell said. “You should be winning your cases. When you don’t, it can erode confidence in the system,” he said.
Saldana-Sanchez, 45, is still outraged about the outcome of the trial of reputed Crips member Jordan Agosto, who was accused in the May 2012 murder of her son, 21-year-old Fabian Gonzalez.
Gonzalez had been in town visiting relatives for Memorial Day when, police said, Agosto opened fire on the stoop where Gonzalez was sitting on Lyvere Street near East Tremont Avenue.
Agosto was acquitted of all charges at trial. Saldaña-Sanchez believes that authorities, who at first believed her son with a gangster, could have worked harder to secure a conviction.
“I think it was a ‘rush, rush,’ because they thought my son was a gang member,” said the 45-year-old, who works at a government base in Alabama. “They didn’t know he was a veteran. They didn’t know what was at stake.”