O'Hara in court today --- not on his own case for damages for the wrongful prosecution and conviction about twenty years ago in a Brooklyn criminal case involving registering to vote and voting --- but as an attorney in another case to prove the "actual innocence" of a wrongfully convicted defendant in a murder case, where the investigating detectives and the Brooklyn DA pretty much always knew that somebody else had committed the crime and the wrongly convicted defendant had nothing to do with it

 

Some time later today, John Kennedy O'Hara will be in a Brooklyn courtroom participating with the defense team in an “actual innocence trial” for Ronnie Wright (A defendant convicted after trial, who has already served 15 years of a 40-year sentence for a murder he did not commit). There is no dispute as to the actual innocence of Mr. Wright, because the real killer had already confessed to  prosecutors in the Brooklyn DA's Office of Charles Hynes,  some  time before Wright went on trial in 2008.  And ever since, delay has been the prosecutor’s strategy, up to and including the present day.....

As interesting and complex as the Ronnie Wright case seeking both freedom and justice might be to some of the readers of this independendent GOP blog for Brooklyn and Staten Island (and there have been offers made for belated freedom for Mr. Wright by representatives and successors of the original prosecutors, but without any real justice for what has been done to that wrongfully prosecuted and convicted man); the Wright case is not nearly as interesting and complex as O'Hara's personal quest for justice. 

In a Daily News Sunday "Op Ed" piece in yesterday's paper, John Kennedy O'Hara (who has been an occasional contributor to this blog's featured posts, and more often an "Anonymous...  " comment maker) indicated that  >>> 

Twenty years earlier O'Hara had been convicted for, “false registration and illegal voting,” the first case of its kind in New York.....  

What is it that O'Hara was alleged to have done ?  ---   He just registered to vote and voted in seven primaries and/or general elections. It resulted in seven felony counts and O'Hara was tried three separate times on the same charges, which was also the first time anyone had been tried three times over in Brooklyn since 1952. Obviously this involved lots of politics.   

According to O'Hara's Op Ed piece for the News,  an investigation by the Brooklyn DA's Conviction Review Unit revealed that   >>>  after O'Hara had run in a primary for the NY State Assembly decades earlier against an incumbent Democrat Assemblyman, a conspiracy was formed among O'Hara's former political opponent, a clubhouse lawyer and close associate of the incumbent Democrat Assemblyman, and Brooklyn DA  Hynes to get O'Hara disbarred by means of conviction of a felony offense or offenses. 

One of the things that unites the cases of both Ronnie Wright and John Kennedy O'Hara is that the prosecutor, Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes in both cases, had an actual ulterior motive and acted with evil intent throughout both prosecutions.  

In the Ronnie Wright case, the actual known perp was a cooperating witness and an informant on other very important cases.  The need to prosecute and convict Ronnie Wright was part of a convoluted plan and cooperation agreement with other prosecutors to protect a confidential informant and government witness in [an]other case(s).

In the John Kennedy O'Hara case, on Brooklyn DA Hynes' first day on the job, he opened an investigation into O'Hara at the behest of the incumbent Democrat Assemblyman, the clubhouse lawyer and close associate of the incumbent Democrat Assemblyman, and several other Democrat incumbent office holders. Once the DA was onboard with the others, the dye was cast, because as O'Hara observed his Daily News Op Ed  >>>  "The way our criminal justice system works, a prosecutor decides who is guilty and then figures out a way to prove it...."

Another thing that O'Hara mentioned in his News Op Ed item was this:   "....  With more than $500 million paid by taxpayers, no prosecutor has ever been held financially accountable until now. Sam Kellner, another wrongfully convicted person, and I have filed claims on Hynes’ estate. Our civil cases will both be tried in the next year or two...."  However, the only offers in the O'Hara case, thus far, have come from the representatives of the clubhouse lawyer and close associate of the incumbent Democrat Assemblyman, and arguably they have exhausted the limits to that lawyer's coverage available for the O'Hara claim (But because a variety of nuances are likely to apply to the various individual defendants in the O'Hara case, multiple "deep pockets" and multiple seperate policy periods are probably involved for some of the named defendants; and as to those individuals, concepts such as "borrowed servant" and "policy stacking," and additional coverage under other general liability, business or excess insurance might well be applicable to the total coverage amount available to indemnify them).