VECCHIONE BACK IN THE NEWS
Fresh off the prosecution of corrupt former Justice Gerald Garson, Brooklyn prosecutor Michael Vecchione is back in the headlines as he prepares a high profile murder case against former FBI agent R. Lindley DeVecchio. DeVecchio is accused of passing along information to his top informer, Colombo capo Gregory Scarpa, knowing that the mobster would use the details to kill his four victims. The New York Sun has an engaging piece about recent machinations in the case. The Brooklyn Eagle has a more nuts-and-bolts take. Last week state Supreme Court Justice Gustin Reichbach agreed to postpone the trial until September 10, allowing Vecchione and a co-prosecutor to have a summer vacation. Reichbach also pushed back DeVecchio’s curfew from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. “Now he can see The Departed one prosecutor quipped. Unlike the Garson case, Vecchione has his work cut out for him: Justice Reichbach has already cast doubt on a court filing in which the D.A.’s office offered a tepid excuse for its inability to secure testimony by federally protected witnesses, calling it “patent nonsense.” A supervisor for 11 of his 33 years as an FBI Agent, DeVecchio retired in 1996 after a two-year federal probe of his relationship with Scarpa found no misconduct. One critical issue in the case is whether prosecutors are tangentially using any statements DeVecchio made in federal proceedings against him, even though he’d been granted immunity.

 
SENTENCE MAKERS
Governor Eliot Spitzer named several appointments recently to the New York State Commission on Sentencing Reforms. The Brooklyn Eagle has the story. The 11-member commission was established to review the state’s sentencing guidelines, and is chaired by Denise O’Donnell, commissioner of the Division of Criminal Justice Services. An ongoing issue are the Rockefeller Drug Laws and their mandatory sentencing regime. As the Drug Policy Alliance tells us, last week Assembly Bill 6663 was introduced by Assemblyman Jeffrion Aubry. The law would expand drug treatment for people convicted of nonviolent drug offenses, and allow certain people serving time for “B” felonies to apply for resentencing--a key piece missing in changes to the law made in 2004 and 2005. Spitzer’s three independent picks and four picks based on recommendations from legislative leaders include: attorney Anthony Bergamo, vice chairman of MB Real Estate and managing director of the Milstein Hotel Group; Monroe County District Attorney Michael C. Green; former Albany County assistant district attorney and current private practitioner Michael P. McDermott; New York City Criminal Court Administrative Judge Juanita Bing Newton; and private practitioner Cyrus Vance Jr., who served on a similar commission in Washington State. Commissioners do not receive salaries.
 

VIRTUAL SEXUAL CONTACT
In a case that has implications about how New York treats so-called Internet sex offenders, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Laura A. Ward yesterday reduced from Level 2 to Level 1 a sexual offender risk assessment of a man convicted of second-degree attempted rape for arranging on the Internet to have sex with an undercover police office he believed to be a 14-year-old girl. In People v. Boncic, Justice Ward found that without actual sexual contact, Christopher Boncic's e-mails and text messages did not constitute a "continuing course of sexual misconduct" and the resulting stricter assessment. Ward wrote: "Although the People proved by clear and convincing evidence that the defendant was contacting the victim over a five-day period, the contacts were, for lack of a better term, 'virtual contacts' through the internet and not 'actual' contact as envisioned by the drafters" of the Sex Offender Registration Act. As reported in The New York Law Journal, Mr. Boncic, then 29, was arrested on March 13, 2006, in the Flatiron District, where he was on his way to meet the purported 14-year-old girl he believed he had been e-mailing regarding "sexual intercourse, oral sex and other sexual misconduct." He had two condoms in his pocket. Under the three-tiered risk assessment rating system, Level 2 offenders must register for life (and information may be released to their communities), while Level 1 offenders must register with the Division of Criminal Justice Services annually for at least 20 years.