Alvin Bragg, the district attorney for Manhattan, has been pursuing a lady for murder for the majority of the past year. But there’s a catch: He repeatedly said in public that he didn’t think it was a murder.
It’s unusual for a prosecutor to place himself in that situation. The killing of Tracy McCarter’s abusive and estranged husband James Murray in March 2020, however, was more than just an oddity for her. With her murder being justified as “self-defense,” Bragg explicitly ran for office on the platform of her innocence. And despite the fact that the evidence would seem to support that claim, he maintained the prosecution that he had vowed to stop, placing McCarter on onerous bail conditions, and moving forward with the trial.
Things changed late last week. In a letter to Justice Diane Kiesel of the New York State Supreme Court, Bragg stated, “After carefully examining all the evidence and in-depth discussion with members of my office, I have a reasonable doubt of whether Ms. McCarter stabbed Mr. Murray with the necessary intent to support a conviction of murder in the second degree.” “I cannot, in good conscience, allow a case to go to trial and expect the jury to reach a verdict that I have not personally reached. The decision is sound. But Bragg’s later statement reveals how strange it is that it took him so long to formally reach a decision that he reached years earlier in a very public manner. I #StandWithTracy,” he tweeted in September 2020, included a link to a story on McCarter’s six-month pre-trial stay on Rikers Island, arguably the most infamously brutal prison in the country. “It is wrong to prosecute a victim of domestic abuse who acted in self-defense.” In a way, the evidence is very clear-cut; it shows Murray’s arrests for domestic violence, an email from 2018 in which he admits to beating McCarter, and a video from the following year in which a nude and inebriated Murray is seen attacking her.
Thus, it’s unclear why McCarter received the “tough on crime” treatment from Bragg, whose office declined to comment further. But the issue is one that merits investigation, especially in light of the fact that the prosecutor in question ran for office on a platform promising to eliminate mass imprisonment, change bail laws, and avoid charging excessive amounts. “JUSTICE FOR ALL,””
