Alvin Bragg was elected Manhattan’s 1st Black district attorney

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NEW YORK (AP)-Democrat Alvin Bragg was elected Tuesday as Manhattan’s first Black district attorney, a position that will give him oversight of prosecutions and ongoing investigations involving former President Donald Trump.

Bragg, a civil rights lawyer and former federal prosecutor, defeated Republican Thomas Kenniff to join a growing wave of progressive, reform-minded prosecutors across the country.

He will replace in January from current district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr., who will retire after the last term in which he prosecuted Harvey Weinstein for rape and filed tax evasion charges against the Trump Organization and to its longtime head of finance, Allen Weisselberg.

Trump himself remains under office investigation after Vance led a multiyear fight to gain access to Republican tax records.

He and Bragg have a history. As a leading representative of New York’s Attorney General in 2018, Bragg helped handle a lawsuit that led to the closure of Trump’s charitable foundation over allegations that he used the nonprofit to advance his political and business interests.

Kenniff, a defense attorney who is a former prosecutor and an Army judge’s advocate general, faces insurmountable career hurdles. Democrats are more than Republicans in Manhattan.

Since its inception, the Manhattan district attorney’s office has been run exclusively by white men, along with its current and most recent former leaders who are children of prominent U.S. statesmen.

Vance’s father was President Jimmy Carter’s former secretary of state. The father of his predecessor, Robert Morgenthau, was President Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of treasury.

Meanwhile, Bragg grew up in Harlem during the 1980s crack cocaine epidemic. At age 15, a police officer stabbed a gun in his face and falsely accused him of being a drug seller as he walked to buy groceries for his father. Bragg filed a complaint at the urging of his parents, which sparked interest in the law.

He had a knife stuck in his throat. As an adult, he opened his home to a brother -in -law who had just been released from prison. Sometimes, Bragg says, the warrant squad will come out looking for the brother -in -law, knocking on the door and waking up his children.

“Those are my stories, but the important thing is that they are our stories,” Bragg said. “These are a lot of people’s stories, and I think bringing those stories and metaphorically, those people, with me in the DA office is important in a symbolic way but also deeply meaningful in a very practical way. way. “

Bragg, 48, spent the last days of his campaign participating in a rare judicial inquiry into the death of Eric Garner, pleading “I can’t breathe” to police officers who dragged him to the ground in a chokehold due to a rallying cry. for Black Lives Matter protesters in 2014.

Bragg called this the most “emotionally significant” case of his career.

Bragg partially campaigned with a promise to change the culture of the DA’s office. He said he wanted to “shrink the system,” refusing to pursue many low-level offenses and seek alternatives to prosecuting petty “crimes of poverty.”

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