James Leeper was one of Koss's early bosses and mentors. At the time, Leeper was running one of the most active bureaus in the office. Prosecutors in it handled nearly all criminal prosecutions in some of the most violent areas of Brooklyn, and the unit was known officially as the "Red Zone." Koss said he wanted to shine there, and saw in Leeper a man to impress and to learn from.
"He had a reputation for being a very strong homicide prosecutor, that he earned it, as opposed to others who were thought of as being political appointees," Koss said of Leeper. "People respected Jim for being a workhorse who earned his spot."
Leeper himself had already been in the Brooklyn office for 14 years. He, like Koss, had his heart set on being a prosecutor in his first years out of law school. So much so that he applied twice, enduring a rejection by the Brooklyn office's top brass in 1985, according to the office's personnel records.
"An [assistant district attorney] plays two vital roles in society," Leeper wrote as part of his second, successful application. "The position requires one to be an advocate within the criminal justice system as well as a neutral and objective representative of the people in the district in which he or she works."
"In the latter role, one has the responsibility to thoroughly investigate all 'leads' in a case and to approach cases with a non-advocacy, or non-adversary, perspective. In that sense, one of the A.D.A's most important duties is to ensure that a defendant's constitutional rights are preserved and protected."
The letter moved the district attorney's office, then run by former US Representative Elizabeth Holtzman, to hire Leeper away from private practice. By 1990, with Hynes having succeeded Holtzman, Leeper had secured a position as a homicide trial attorney, an impressively advanced assignment for a young man with only three years of experience as a prosecutor.
By the time Koss was christened as a fledgling prosecutor in 2001, Leeper was head of the Red Zone, and "everyone," according to Koss, "wanted to work in the Red Zone."
"It had the coolest people in it. The coolest bosses," said Koss. "It was the place to be and I got it. I got lucky."
Koss reported to Leeper for more than a decade, and he, like so many others who worked under Leeper, revered the man for his fairness and loyalty. Leeper stuck up for younger prosecutors when they made missteps; he took them aside to school them in the art of persuading a jury; he gave them opportunities to challenge themselves.
"He had implicit faith in me, and if you earned that trust, he'd never micromanage," Koss said. "He believed I could handle myself. He only came to see me do one trial. I had a cooperating witness and he came to watch me put him on, and after that he never questioned me again. I wanted him to trust me because I wanted to be in his good graces. People wanted him to think you were a good D.A."
But those who worked with Leeper came to see a troubled side of him, too. In interviews, more than half a dozen lawyers who worked in the office at the time said Leeper's drinking became pronounced, and, as a result, a problem. Two years ago, according to numerous people in the office, Leeper's drinking cost him his title. Personnel records show he was demoted from chief of the Red Zone back to the homicide bureau, but do not list a reason.
The district attorney's office would not comment on the cause for the demotion.
For his part, Koss moved on to his own new job within the office: deputy bureau chief of the Conviction Integrity Unit, a small group of assistant district attorneys and investigators tasked with re-examining old convictions that might have been flawed.
Koss, in his new job, soon found himself in the uncomfortable and unpopular position of reviewing cases handled by prosecutors who had made their marks years before. He says, however, that he came to feel a sense of gratification in the work: finding evidence that might lead to an innocent person's release, rather than a guilty person's incarceration.
Koss's first case wound up widely celebrated. Over a year-long investigation, Koss and his supervisor, John O'Mara, found evidence that an unemployed printer had been wrongly convicted of murdering a beloved Williamsburg rabbi in 1990. Hynes consented to the release of David Ranta following Koss' investigation in March 2013.
"I'm sure people resented me for it, but I didn't really care," Koss said of the unit's work.
In June 2013, three months after Ranta's release, Koss left the office. But he said he had made a critical observation in his last year there, one that would stay with him in the coming months: Murder cases, especially those tried in Brooklyn in the early, bloody 1990s, could be seriously flawed, and so could the prosecutors who handled them.
Newly in private practice, Koss came to learn of an imprisoned man named Jonathan Fleming, and shortly afterward he joined Fleming's bid for freedom. Fleming's case was pending before the Conviction Integrity Unit Koss once helped run, and Koss realized quickly what lay ahead: He'd be challenging the work and perhaps the ethics of his onetime mentor.
The Alibi Defense
Jonathan Fleming didn't have an unblemished record or reputation in Brooklyn in the late 1980s, having racked up a number of convictions, including for robbery and weapons possession.
This receipt from a Quality Inn in Orlando, Florida, was taken from Jonathan Fleming at the time of his arrest. It suggests he was thousands of miles away from a murder he was convicted of, just hours before it occurred.
But the evidence that Fleming was the man who had gunned down Darryl Rush back in 1989, even at the time of the trial, was less than overwhelming.
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