A judge said Queens prosecutors hid evidence. A secret committee cleared them anyway.

Five years ago, one of the state’s top judges found Queens prosecutors had deliberately hidden evidence that could have spared three men decades in prison. Not long afterward, an attorney asked a disciplinary committee to investigate the incident.

The committee has finally returned its own finding. There is “insufficient evidence” the prosecutors had violated any of the “rules and laws governing attorney conduct,” according to a letter from the committee that was obtained by Gothamist.

The letter states the committee has closed the complaints against seven prosecutors filed in connection with the wrongful murder conviction of George Bell.

The five-sentence letter offers no information about the committee’s investigation or reasoning. Gothamist’s reporting on the matter is the first public confirmation of how the disciplinary process ended, and may be the only accounting the public ever gets.

The dismissals close, at least for now, the last open question in one of the most high-profile exonerations in recent years. Bell and his codefendants, Rohan Bolt and Gary Johnson, spent nearly a combined 75 years of their lives in prison before they were set free. They’ve since won more than $60 million from the city and state for their wrongful incarceration.

The two lead prosecutors in the case, Charles Testagrossa and Brad Leventhal, left their government positions shortly after the judge’s ruling came down in 2021, and their attorneys say they’ve suffered irreparable professional fallout. But they have faced no official, publicly disclosed discipline from their former offices or the system charged with policing their profession.

Whether the outcome represents a vindication or is yet another sign that New York’s prosecutorial accountability system is broken depends on whom you ask.

Under state law, grievance committees’ work is done behind closed doors, so it’s nearly impossible to review their findings — though an appeals court ruling this summer could force New York’s grievance system into the open for the first time in decades. Advocates note that the committees have rarely acted on allegations of prosecutorial misconduct. They say they’ve found only a handful of examples in which a prosecutor’s license was suspended.

“You figure, well, this one’s pretty clear,” said Steve Zeidman, a CUNY School of Law professor and member of Accountability New York, a coalition of professors that has filed dozens of its own grievances against New York prosecutors, including other complaints against Testagrossa and Leventhal. “There’s not a lot of nuance here. Evidence was withheld. There were other violations. Surely the grievance committee will act. And then to see them do what they’ve been doing since anyone can remember is, you know, it’s an abject failure of the system.”

‘Hide evidence, hide the truth’

The complaints against the prosecutors stem from March 5, 2021, when Queens Supreme Court Judge Joseph Zayas, now the state’s chief administrative judge, struck down the convictions of Bell, Bolt and Johnson. They’d each spent 24 years in prison for the 1996 murders of the owner of a check-cashing store and an off-duty NYPD officer who was working as the owner’s security guard.

Zayas said in his ruling that the men had been wrongfully convicted. Police reports in the possession of the Queens district attorney pointed to a different set of perpetrators, a violent robbery crew known as Speedstick, the judge wrote. Those reports indicated that members of the group had told witnesses about a check-cashing job on Astoria Boulevard that had gone sideways. And Testagrossa, the prosecutor, had documented the possible connection in handwritten notes two years before Bell’s trial, identifying one Speedstick member as the likely getaway driver in the check-cashing murders. The prosecution also had documentation that the witness who first accused the three men of the crime had a history of auditory hallucinations and had recently attempted suicide.

None of this evidence was turned over, a fact the district attorney’s office itself acknowledged when it joined the motion to clear the convictions. At one point a newspaper report linked the gang’s leaders to the murders, but when Bell’s attorney asked the prosecution for this evidence, they were told it didn’t exist, the judge wrote. When they pressed Testagrossa at trial, he told the court there was “no connection” between the Speedstick gang and the check-cashing murders. Leventhal, his cocounsel, described the defense’s repeated requests as a “fishing expedition,” according to trial exchanges quoted in Zayas’ ruling.

By the time Zayas made his ruling, the Queens district attorney’s office had completed its own reinvestigation of the case and had agreed exculpatory evidence had been withheld at trial, according to records. The judge was unsparing in both his written judgment and his comments from the bench.

The prosecution, he wrote, “completely abdicated its truth-seeking role” in a case where the stakes “could not have been higher,” a reference to the fact that the state had initially sought the death penalty for then-19-year-old Bell, who had no criminal record.

From the bench, according to transcripts, he went further still: “Instead of acting as truth seekers, the prosecution team sought ways to suppress and hide evidence, hide the truth.”

Within days, Leventhal resigned from his post at St. John’s University School of Law, in Queens, where he taught an evidence class. “The prosecutor’s role is not to win, but to do justice,” the school’s dean wrote in a March 2021 email to students, in which he announced Leventhal’s resignation. Both prosecutors resigned from their DA jobs around this time, Leventhal in Queens and Testagrossa in Nassau County.

A five-year investigation

In the months following Zayas’ ruling, Marc Wolinsky, an attorney who had represented Bell pro bono during his exoneration proceedings, turned to the state’s attorney grievance process to seek some sort of formal reprimand. Wolinsky declined to speak with Gothamist for this story.

The July 14, 2026 dismissal letter addressed to him and obtained by Gothamist through another party does not name the seven subjects of the complaints, only identifying them by case numbers. But attorneys for Testagrossa and Leventhal confirmed the complaints against the two men were recently dismissed.

Under state law, complaints against lawyers, along with the resulting investigations, are kept entirely confidential unless the issue is referred to the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court and the court decides to take disciplinary action.

What the committee did during the past five years is known only to the participants.

Robert Masters, a former senior Queens prosecutor who represented Leventhal pro bono and calls him a close personal friend, described a long, exhaustive review of the record involving an initial submission that included hundreds of pages of exhibits followed by rounds of follow-up inquiries from the committee. Masters said he also presented a number of character letters from defense attorneys and retired judges on Leventhal’s behalf.

It’s not clear whether the committee was engaged in active investigation during the entire five-year period. Masters said he believes the committee may have paused to allow the civil litigation to conclude in case it surfaced anything new.

“I would say, looking at it with an unjaundiced eye … accusations made, allegations made in a fairly compressed time period that are found ultimately not to be supported after a five-year investigation, I’d be hard-pressed to criticize that process,” Masters said.

Both Masters and John Leventhal, a retired judge who represented Testagrossa during the proceedings, noted that the committee had much more time to review the case. At the time of the exoneration, Zayas noted he’d only had the case for two-and-a-half weeks.

“The grievance committee did a complete investigation, a thorough investigation, and for five years, and they found there was insufficient evidence of professional misconduct,” John Leventhal said.

The attorneys also pointed to what the Queens district attorney’s office concluded at the time of the exoneration. Though the office’s Conviction Integrity Unit, a special bureau that reinvestigates potential wrongful convictions, had found its prosecutors failed to turn over evidence pointing to other suspects, the office believed they’d done so unknowingly. “The defendants were prosecuted in good faith and with legally sufficient evidence,” the unit’s chief wrote in his court filing.

At the time, Zayas addressed the chief’s language directly, pushing back on the notion they had, indeed, acted in “good faith,” noting that, either way, their misconduct had led to three wrongful convictions.

Prosecutors rarely sanctioned

The length of the committee’s investigation only makes the thin notice of a dismissal more confounding for critics of the grievance process.

“I can’t figure out, for the life of me, how anybody investigating this could determine anything other than that there was egregious misconduct,” Zeidman said. “I try and imagine a stronger case. What do you need, like a prosecutor on tape saying, ‘I deliberately withheld exculpatory material’?”

Zeidman isn’t alone. Hal Lieberman, a former chief counsel of the disciplinary committee covering Manhattan and the Bronx and an expert in legal ethics, has been following the case for years and was similarly confounded. He describes himself as professional friends with Wolinsky, Bell’s attorney.

Based on the judicial findings, “and what I have heard about the Attorney Grievance Committee’s investigation, there seems to be an overwhelming amount of evidence that George Bell and his codefendants were wrongfully convicted of murder due to very serious ethical violations,” Lieberman said. “It is astounding that [the committee] delayed for five years and then saw fit to do nothing about disciplining these former government lawyers.”

Mitch Dinnerstein, Bell’s original trial lawyer, has stayed with the case for nearly three decades. He called the outcome “unconscionable.”

“What else did they need?” he asked.

It’s something of a miracle any of this has come to light, Dinnerstein said. The initial buried police reports that launched the reinvestigation into Bell’s conviction surfaced by chance. They’d been included in a set of documents given to a different attorney working a different case, who happened to recognize their importance.

“We were lucky that we found these police reports that were buried,” Dinnerstein said. “If we never found them, those guys would still be in prison, and that’s really scary.”

Still, critics of the review system say dismissal wasn’t entirely shocking.

“You could look at the number of times the grievance commission goes after a prosecutor, and the answer is basically zero,” Dinnerstein said.

Peter Santina, with the group Civil Rights Corps, said he’s aware of fewer than five instances of a New York prosecutor’s law license being suspended for on-the-job misconduct and has yet to find a case of a prosecutor being disbarred. That’s based on his group’s searches of court records and news reports — since no public system tracks findings of prosecutorial misconduct.

However, there’s a chance the process is on the verge of major change. Over the past five years, Civil Rights Corps and the professors with Accountability New York have filed dozens of complaints against prosecutors flowing from judicial findings of misconduct. Two weeks ago the Second Circuit ruled that the groups have a right to the grievance committees’ dispositions and records related to hearings in their cases.

The coalition’s own complaints against Testagrossa and Leventhal, filed separately from Wolinsky’s, are among those covered by the ruling.

“That provides an opportunity to actually see what the grievance committee did or did not do, and the decision they reached,” Santina said, speaking about the decision broadly. “We hope that it’ll provide insight into what their justifications are for their decisions, whatever those are.”