Leslie Crocker Snyder
NYLJ Photo/Rick Kopstein

As her campaign for district attorney was drawing to a close, Leslie Crocker Snyder said she was telling supporters that the race is going to be "close," and that the last week may be the "toughest" of a "tough race."

But her message that she has been in New York "protecting New Yorkers for 35 years through thick and thin" has resonated with voters, she said in an interview, and "the feeling is we are going to do it [win the primary]."

Ms. Snyder, 67, is the only woman in a three-candidate field and has a resume heavy in firsts for women: first woman to try a homicide case in Manhattan; founder and head of the nation's first sex crimes unit in a prosecutor's office.

Now she is seeking a new first—to become Manhattan's first female district attorney.

The only one of the three candidates who has run for office before, Ms. Snyder is a polished campaigner who generally stays on message, and as the campaign has heated up in its final weeks, has proven she can be a tough puncher.

Her 20 years on the bench and eight in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office enable her to speak with what she claims is unmatched authority about what is right and wrong with the criminal justice system and the office under Robert Morgenthau, which she has criticized as "stale."

But her long track record also has given critics ammunition to use against her, as they question her fairness and accuse her of flip-flopping on the death penalty and the prosecution of white-collar crime and other issues.

Ms. Snyder is skillful in weaving the key themes of her campaign—that she is a "progressive" and a champion of women's rights—into her remarks.

She frequently makes references to her success in winning legislation to prevent defense lawyers from cross-examining sex-crime victims about their sexual histories. Similarly, in describing her perspective from the bench she will often say she reacts "as a mother."

And she recalls how Frank S. Hogan, Mr. Morgenthau's predecessor who hired her, told her that she would have to obtain a permission slip from her husband before he assigned her to homicide cases.

Local media outlets, most prominently The New York Times, and many prominent attorneys—including Mr. Morgenthau—are backing Cyrus R. Vance Jr. Ms. Snyder has responded by casting herself as the opponent of the establishment. As the campaign has proceeded, she has made pointed references to the animus toward her by an "old boy's network" that includes Messrs. Morgenthau and Vance. She has observed, for example, that Mr. Vance's late father sat on the board of the Times for many years.

On the bench, Ms. Snyder developed a reputation for draconian sentences, but like her opponents, she has run on a platform of crime prevention and treatment for non-violent offenders. She stresses that while she gave lengthy sentences to hardened criminals who deserved them, she labored hard to place youngsters who faced nonviolent drug charges in treatment programs so they would have a chance to turn their lives around. "We cannot incarcerate our way out of crime," she often says.

Changing Positions

Ms. Snyder has faced persistent criticism from her two rivals for what they have portrayed as her changing positions on the death penalty and white-collar crime with Mr. Vance asking her at a recent NY1 debate how voters could be confident of her "core values."

In a book she wrote in 2002 before she left the bench, entitled "25-to-Life," Ms. Snyder said she would not have "lost a moment's sleep" if she had been permitted to impose the death penalty for a particularly heinous rape-murder and recounted how she had told the defendant that she would have been willing to administer the lethal injection herself.

During the NY1 debate, Ms. Snyder acknowledged her remarks were "intemperate" and that she regrets making them. But she described her reaction to the defendant as that of a mother to a "grisly" crime.

Ms. Snyder says, as she wrote in the book, that she believed the death penalty "should only be used sparingly, for the most heinous cases." During the 2005 campaign she limited those to cases against terrorists and serial child rapists.

Ms. Snyder now says she opposes capital punishment in all cases, a change of heart she ascribes to her investigation of the wrongful conviction of a Westchester County man (NYLJ, May 20).

With regard to white-collar crime, during the 2005 campaign, Ms. Snyder criticized Mr. Morgenthau for wasting resources on the prosecution of Dennis Koslowski, who was convicted of stealing $150 million from the company he headed, Tyco. Such prosecutions were better left to federal prosecutors and the state attorney general, Ms. Snyder then contended, because they have more resources and better jurisdiction.

Ms. Snyder now says she would vigorously press white-collar cases, because, in light of the Bernard Madoff scandal and other crimes stemming from the financial meltdown, times have changed.

But she adds she would focus on white-collar crimes, such as predatory lending and fraudulent debt collection practices, that hit ordinary Manhattan residents—cases federal prosecutors are not interested in.

Snyder's Major Initiatives

• Set aside funds for treatment programs and hire a full-time coordinator to provide alternatives to incarceration for younger, non-violent offenders.

• Create community partnerships by linking assistant district attorneys with community leaders, social service agencies and law enforcement to work to prevent crime.

• Create a Second Look Bureau composed of experienced attorneys who would determine, independently of the prosecutor who originally handled a conviction, whether a credible basis exists for re-examining the disposition.

• Create a Housing Bureau to prosecute cases against landlords who abuse their tenants and to work aggressively with the police to rid public housing projects of drug dealers.

• Establish a new bureau solely to investigate and prosecute complaints of domestic violence.

• Aggressively prosecute white-collar crimes affecting the poor and elderly; predatory lending; health insurance fraud; identity theft; and consumer fraud.

• Improve relations with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered community (LGBT); hire openly LGBT staff; establish a liaison to the LGBT community.

• Assign a Criminal Court management "czar" and senior staff to review the caseload and dismiss any unprovable cases to bring down backlog.

• Start videotaping interrogations of witnesses and implement double-blind lineup procedures to curb wrongful convictions.

• Elevate the unit that prosecutes vehicular crimes to a bureau, to investigate, and prosecute where appropriate, any case where a car is involved in a fatality.

Ms. Snyder has been backed by court officers and various law enforcements groups, including the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, but she also has aggressively courted key constituencies such as tenants and gay voters.

She has proposed a housing bureau to protect tenants against harassment by landlords and to address drug dealing in public housing developments. In response to crimes against the LGBT community, she has promised vigorous enforcement of hate crimes law and to press criminal charges in cases where gays are the victims of domestic violence.

She has landed endorsements from former mayor Edward I. Koch, who appointed her to the bench in 1993; from several politically influential women, including Geraldine Ferraro, former U.S. vice presidential candidate; Karen Burstein, a former family court judge and candidate for state attorney general who is openly gay; and Ruth Messinger, a stalwart Upper West Side liberal who unsuccessfully challenged Rudolph W. Giuliani in 1997. Ms. Snyder has known Ms. Messinger, who was Manhattan borough president for seven years, since the two were classmates at Radcliffe College in the class of 1962. Ms. Snyder also has the support of former Southern District U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White.

Ms. Snyder has more recently been endorsed by eight former presidents of the Women's Bar Association of New York, and by the group's current president, retired Manhattan Justice Jacqueline W. Silbermann.

Citizens Union, a group founded in 1897 dedicated to political reform, also has backed her, giving her credibility in liberal circles.

Role as a Judge

Many of Ms. Snyder's critics have not been convinced by her advocacy of "social justice" and progressive ideas.

Mr. Morgenthau, for one, has made no secret of his distaste for her, saying earlier this year on the "Charlie Rose Show" that she has "no humility." He recently criticized as "irresponsible" her promise to put into a grand jury the case of Etan Patz, who disappeared in 1975 at age 6, while accepting the endorsement of the boy's father.

Daniel N. Arshak, who last year was the president of the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said that Ms. Snyder's manner on the bench reflected a lack of compassion for defendants and that she "should not be making decisions about people's lives as either a prosecutor or judge."

"Leslie Crocker Snyder talks out of both sides of her mouth," Mr. Arshak said. "I would not trust her to do anything that she says she will do that is different from what she said before she first ran for district attorney in 2005."

Gerald Lefcourt called the former judge a "knee-jerk prosecutor who doesn't have a lot of balance." And many among a dozen or so defense lawyers interviewed recently at the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse at 100 Centre St. doubted whether she would carry out the treatment programs she has been advocating.

But Roger Stavis, a defense attorney and head of the New York City Bar's Criminal Courts Committee, is a supporter.

"She was a tough judge and ruffled feathers," Mr. Stavis said, while adding that her treatment proposals are "very enlightened and she takes them very seriously."

@|Daniel.Wise@incisivemedia.com