Lasak is no stranger to being met with disagreement by appellate panels. The New York Law Journal reviewed cases on appeal and found more than a dozen convictions secured in Lasak’s courtroom since 2010 being upset, including Alexander’s.
In 2016, for example, the Second Department reversed a manslaughter conviction in People v. Singh over the trial court’s failure to instruct the jury it could reach a self-defense conclusion. In 2013, the Second Department reversed a murder conviction based on a pattern of prosecutor misconduct in People v. Singleton. And in 2010, Lasak was found to have wrongly directed sentences for first-degree manslaughter and third-degree weapon possession to run consecutively in People v. Poux.
Lasak did not respond to multiple requests for comment made through a spokesman.
The appeal in Alexander’s case also spotlighted another issue that has raised concerns for Queens court observers. As the Law Journal reported in August, members of the Queens defense bar and other court-watchers have raised questions about the number of assistant DAs in the Queens office who count judges on the bench in the borough courts as family members—a unique situation among city prosecutors.
ADA Buchter, the prosecutor in the Alexander case, is one such person: she is the daughter of Supreme Court Justice Richard Buchter.
Members of DA Brown’s staff argue that concerns over the appearance of judges’ children before their colleagues in the same court are unfounded, calling the suggestions unfortunate and damaging. Executive Assistant District Attorney Robert Masters said the office was seeking leave to appeal the appellate court’s reversal.
“I would have thought the Law Journal would have been more focused on the legal precedent created in the Alexander decision, rather than the genealogy of the trial assistant,” he said in a statement later provided to the Law Journal. “Significantly, the error at the heart of the matter’s reversal was not one committed by Ms. Buchter, a very talented and ethical prosecutor, but an alleged one, ascribed to the trial judge—an error that the office will seek to rectify on appeal.”
New York Law School professor Rebecca Roiphe, herself a former state prosecutor, said issues like Batsonchallenges are already fraught with sensitive concerns that judges have to carefully confront all the time, and how they’re handled needs to assure all those involved that everyone starts with a level playing field.
“They’re the kinds of issues that, on their own, could call into question not just the legitimacy of a particular prosecution, but of the entire criminal justice system,” she said. “You throw one little extra thing into the story, like the prosecutor is a child of a colleague on the bench, and because it’s so precarious to start with, because these issues by their nature bring up such sensitive questions, that it’s a good example of how what seems like an innocuous thing can sow discord throughout the entire process.”