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With Manhattan lawyer Kenneth Thompson running against incumbent Charles J. Hynes for Brooklyn District Attorney, it becomes fair to ask how the challenger fared in his one major stint as a prosecutor.
How did he do? Records made available by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a non-profit group which discloses the fiscal year workload of federal prosecutors and other government officials, show that Thompson had an above average conviction rate for the Brooklyn office, getting convictions in 77 percent of his cases -- a decent rate but not at the top end. The office average from fiscal 1986 through FY 2010 was 68 percent. Some of the stars in the office got convictions between 80 percent to 93 percent of the time while handling more cases.
TRAC records show Thompson handled, along with the odd racketeering case, a garden variety of drug trafficking, postal fraud and immigration cases. Some of the defendants in Thompson’s cases, while convicted, tended to draw fewer prison sentences, perhaps a sign that the cases were marginal or that judges didn’t believe prison was justified. About 38 percent of those defendants got no prison sentences; the officer average was 29.7 percent, according to TRAC.
When Thompson’s defendants got prison terms they tended to be less than the median for the office, except in FY 1999 when the median sentences were 46 months, compared to the office’s median of 24 months, stated TRAC.
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