Brooklyn is trading its scandal-plagued district attorney for a man who rose to fame during another notorious case. Kenneth Thompson beat Charles Hynes, who has held the office since 1990, with a 55 percent to 45 percent lead. The New York Times notes that it’s rare for a district attorney to be unseated in this city, but there have been a wide range of negative reports on Hynes and his staff recently, ranging from accusations that he was soft on child sex abusers in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community to his recent review of more than 50 murder cases due to allegedly shoddy and unethical work by a retired homicide detective. Apparently voters were less troubled by Hynes’s claim that Thompson mishandled the Dominique Strauss-Kahn sexual-assault case, in which he represented housekeeper Nafissatou Diallo.
