Westchester Guardian/The Advocate.

Thursday, March 19, 2009

The Advocate
Richard Blassberg

It’s Judicial Harassment; Nothing Less
Prosecutors And Judges Have Access To Unlimited Resources, Our Tax Dollars,
With Which To Harass Us Into Pleading Guilt Despite Our Innocence

As one who is fully familiar with the Louis Balancio case, the role of former District Attorney Jeanine Pirro and her former Chief Assistant,
ADA Clement Patti, as well as ADA Steven Bender, still drawing two hefty paychecks a month in that office, and, as one who attended
each and every hearing before the United States District Court in White Plains, as well as the United States Second Circuit Court of Appeals,
and, as one who has read hundreds of pages of motions and transcripts, even including secretly recorded conversations by Pirro, Patti and Bender, with the former head of the United States Attorney’s Office’s Criminal Division, Mark Pomerantz, in late December 1997, I am now compelled to conclude that State Supreme Court Justice Lester B. Adler has shamelessly allowed himself to become a major player in a cruelly calculated judicial harassment.

His willingness to participate in that scheme and thus perpetuate the lie that was confabulated, and given birth to when Pirro, against the
overwhelming weight of evidence to the contrary; evidence that included a confession by the actual killer of Louis Balancio, Nick Djonovic, and statements from some 20 individuals present, all exculpatory to Anthony DiSimone, unfortunately, will come to define Judge Adler.

Obviously, it is too much to expect of this State Supreme Court Judge, sitting in the Westchester Courthouse, to follow through and purge that edifice of the stain recognized within it, when Judge Calabresi, sitting in the United States Second Circuit Court of Appeals, declared,
of the Westchester District Attorney’s handling of Anthony DiSimone, “In 12 years on this Court I have never seen such a Brady violation.”

And, obviously, it is too much to expect that the same State Supreme Court Justice Lester B. Adler would not want to exhume the more than
11-year-old indictment which took four grand juries to finally garner, given the mutually acknowledged prosecutorial misconduct that fathered its wretched hide. For, truth be told, Judge Adler, for whom there is every good reason to expect that he has done his homework, surely must know that the sperm that was used to conceive the indictment, The Big Lie, so very essential for political reasons to Mrs. Pirro, came from one Darren Mazzarella, a creature who, together with his brother Nick, was locked up on federal murder charges involving two killings unrelated to the Balancio killing, which occurred in the early morning hours of February 4, 1994.

Surely, Judge Adler knows that the i ndictment was not only the product of extreme prosecutorial misconduct; Brady violations, witness
coercion, including false prosecutions of those who would not participate in the Big Lie, but also, and most importantly, the deal struck
by Pirro with Darren Mazzarella, who she had previously indicted for Balancio’s murder, and who, in fact, had held him down, allowing Djonovic to stab him 13 times without mercy.

Why would any self-respecting State Supreme Court Justice choose to join such a malicious and cruel conspiracy to perpetuate such a lie,
cruel to both the DiSimone and Balancio families?

It is one thing that a socio-pathic district attorney, the likes of Jeanine Pirro, could set in motion such a colossal lie in furtherance of her need
to demonstrate that her husband’s connections to the Mob should not have disqualified her for Lieutenant Governor. It’s another that Janet Di-Fiore, for the first 16 months of her reign, continued to keep concealed more than 376 pages, 52 boxes, and miles of secretly recorded audio tape, all exculpatory to Anthony DiSimone while, at the same time, sending ADA Valerie Livingston into United States District Court, and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, to bald-facedly lie to Judge Charles L. Brieant and a three-judge panel under Judge Calabresi.

To Janet’s way of reasoning, it was more important to protect Steven Bender and others still in her Office from exposure, not to mention
police, medical examiners, former judges, and others who also played a role in the horrific choreographed injustice, than it was to free a man
who she knew to be innocent, and who had already done seven years hard-time in Greenhaven Prison.

Never mind her propoganda about a “Second-Look Program.” Her treatment of Anthony DiSimone, and her continued deception of the Balancios, is the real Janet DiFiore. Why, then, would Supreme Court Justice Lester B. Adler fail to do the right thing, even given some of his
past, politically-motivated, severe sentences of a clearly innocent, but railroaded, brain-damaged defendant, and a middle-aged, homeless Navy veteran for a self-defense manslaughter, given a murder sentence? Why, indeed, would he now be breathing life into a corrupted indictment based upon the grand jury testimony of one despicable felon who, together with his brother, was already in federal custody for two other murders, and who, as the principal prosecution witness at the trial of Anthony DiSimone, could not tell the jury that he saw him do anything to Louis Balancio?

What is so special about Darren Mazzarella that a judge should take his word over the word of some 20 other witnesses, including friends of
Louis Balancio, all of whom would not implicate DiSimone, refusing to lie for Pirro, most of whom were harassed and even charged with bogus crimes for their refusal. Perhaps it is Mazzarella’s prior experience with murder that makes him so special.

Just what is it, after all, that keeps Les Adler from doing the right thing? Has he fallen under the influence of newly-minted Democratic DA Janet DiFiore, who can’t afford the reversal of still another high-profile, bad Pirro conviction? Has he forgotten how Janet lied about her experience as an Assistant DA under Carl Vergari and Jeanine Pirro when she was running as a Republican against him for County
Court, claiming that she had prosecuted 2,000 cases when, in fact, she had tried a total of 12, all misdemeanors?

One can speculate about any number of political and personal motivations that may be in play at a time when the integrity of the administrative judge is under continued scrutiny, and his very close friend, the DA, who, having forsaken the Republican Party, which stuck by her through thick and thin in four election bids, is now using the power of her Office to keep intelligent, free-thinking Democrats, blindly towing the mark for her re-election. Perhaps doing the right thing doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in the corrupt Hell of the Westchester
County Courthouse where judges are assigned cases and told how they are supposed to be decided.

Ugly politics and powerplays aside, how can Judge Adler want to endorse a document such as the indictment of Anthony DiSimone, conceived as it was only after four tries? It was the product of a self-promoting, tyrannical prosecutor and a self-dealing, murderous felon who will now have to violate his plea deal with the federal government and come out of the Witness Protection Program to, once again, give
his untruthful and unconvincing testimony against Anthony DiSimone, or else face perjury charges.

No, there can be no question that the action taken recently against Anthony DiSimone, and against the most fundamental principles
of justice and fair play by Les Adler, represent his predetermined obedience to the wishes and dictates of a corrupt district attorney
without the moral authority to be overseeing an office with such power over the lives and liberty of nearly one million Westchester residents.

Anthony DiSimone was acquitted of Intentional Murder following a jury trial in 2000, a very important fact. Despite all of the mountain of
exculpatory evidence kept hidden from his defense attorney and, consequently, from the jurors, they simply could not buy the Prosecution’s
story. If they had, they would surely have found a man who they believed stabbed another man 13 times to death, guilty of Intentional Murder.

The jury acquitted DiSimone, and he can never be tried for intentionally murdering Louis Balancio again because of the Constitutional prohibition against double-jeopardy. However, in 2000, a devious prosecutor such as Jeanine Pirro could still avail herself of a charge that included both Intentional Murder and Depraved Mind Murder, a practice no longer permissible. There is no way under Case Law,
from the state’s highest court, since March of 2004, that anyone charged with repeatedly stabbing someone in a one-on-one confrontation, even three or four stabs, not to mention 13, can lawfully be charged with Depraved Indifference Murder.

In short, it wasn’t Justice or Truth that DA Pirro was seeking in 1997, and it surely isn’t Justice or Truth that motivates Janet DiFiore now. There’s a reason why 72 attorneys and investigators have left her Office in her first three years, and why the Office is in “freefall”. As with everything she has manipulated and forced into being, Janet DiFiore has not yet learned the meaning of the phrase, “Be Careful What You Wish For.” Her installation into the DA’s Office was one such wish, and she is way over her head. Bringing Anthony DiSimone to trial for the Balancio killing, will be a suicide mission for Janet, and she knows it. What she is, in fact, engaged in, with the culpable assistance of Les Adler, is a “full court press,” a judicial harassment intended to force DiSimone to agree to a guilty plea of some lesser strength.

However, she is miscalculating or not bothering to consider, the determination of DiSimone and his family to get the truth out once and
for all, and their recognition that a new trial may be the only way to finally accomplish that.