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It’s hard to decide which recent action shocked more people- the gruesome discovery of body parts found scattered in a Suffolk County park, or the accusations of Governor Kathy Hochul that the Suffolk County police should have done a better job if they wanted to keep the four people accused of dumping the body parts behind bars. An exasperated Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney answered back that real life cases are not wrapped up in an hour like they are on CSI. Tierney appeared on 710 WOR’s Len Berman and Michael Riedel in the Morning program to discuss how his office is treating the case, within the limits of current bail reform laws.
Tierney explained the process to Berman and Larry Mendte, sitting in for Riedel, as follows: “When you talk about a case where you find a body part in a park, and then you proceed to find more body parts, you know, to go from that and then in seven days to have the four individuals who dumped the body parts, that’s good police work. The Suffolk County police department did a great job here, but now we’ve got to be able to prove who murdered the two victims… and what we really need is, in the interim, while we’re working those cases, we should be able to argue danger to the community when we ask for bail, because if we were able to argue that, these individuals would be in jail.”
As to Hochul’s casual brush-off of subpar police work, Tierney says bail reform changes prevent him from doing what he would have done in the past as his office compiled the evidence to make a charge stick. “I was a federal prosecutor, and I did the MS-13 cases, and oftentimes we would have individuals come from Central America and commit murders. We would hardly know who they were, we might have a street name, we might have a description, and we would go out and we would be able to arrest suspects on other charges, argue dangerousness, keep them in, and then thirty days later charge them with murder, but obviously in the interim they’re in jail so the public is kept safe.”
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