A Brooklyn political gadfly, wielding a long-hidden document as proof, plans a $25 million malicious prosecution suit against ex-prosecutor Charles J. Hynes.
John O’Hara filed a notice of claim Thursday against the former district attorney, the city and other Brooklyn prosecutors barely a month after his exoneration in a 1997 voter fraud case.
“In an effort to obtain O’Hara’s unlawful conviction, they fabricated statements and evidence (and) coerced and intimidated witnesses to provide false testimony,” the notice of claim charged.
O’Hara’s case is based in part on a shocking handwritten document delivered to the defense when the DA’s office surrendered three boxes of evidence in the summer of 2015.
Before the start of O’Hara’s unprecedented third trial, ex-prosecutor John O’Mara allegedly scrawled a note about how offering the defendant a plea bargain could help avoid a future lawsuit.
“Discussed the law … (the deal) would foreclose lawsuit for malicious prosecution,” read his handwritten notes.
The proposed deal was a guilty plea to a charge that would disappear from O’Hara’s previously clean criminal record in six months.
O’Hara was eventually prosecuted on the charge after an unprecedented three trials.
“They kept having trials to avoid a lawsuit,” O’Hara told the Daily News. “That’s why I was the first person in Brooklyn to be tried three times on the same charges. For 20 years it worked.”
A spokeswoman for the NYC Law Department said they “will review the claim.”
Political outsider O’Hara — the first New Yorker prosecuted for voter fraud since Susan B. Anthony in 1873 — was cleared in January after the Brooklyn DA’s conviction review unit looked at his case.
Anthony was charged with casting her ballot even though women weren’t allowed to vote.
O’Hara faced seven counts of voter fraud at three separate legal proceedings, beginning with a 1997 conviction.
The verdict was overturned on appeal the next year, but a 1999 trial resulted in a hung jury before a third prosecution led to a felony conviction that was upheld in 2001.
O’Hara’s law license was yanked, and he served 1,500 hours of community service and paid $20,000 in fines. He also spent five years on probation.
A 2009 decision by the Appellate Division reinstated O’Hara as an attorney, ruling the disbarment was unwarranted.
O’Hara, a political activist, was indicted for voter fraud when he was sharing an apartment with his then-girlfriend while still holding onto his own rent-stabilized residence.
Prosecutors accused him of voting in a district where he no longer lived.
“The only good thing that came out of this is I didn’t have to wait for my funeral to find out who my friends are,” said O’Hara.
Those also named as defendants are the NYPD, O’Mara, prosecutors Angelo Morelli, Dino Amoroso, Ronnie Jaus and Investigator Allan Presser.
“We are looking to hold each and every individual who was responsible for the arrest and conviction of John O’Hara,” said his lawyer, Dennis Kelly.
“And it starts with Joe Hynes, who used his political power to eliminate any type of opposition in the Democratic Party … John was the collateral damage along with many others.”
