If you live in Manhattan, you may (or may not) know that it's Democratic primary day! There are a few races, but I'm putting in my plug for Cy Vance for Manhattan District Attorney. I am hearing word that turnout around the city is low, so I'd like to encourage voting today, and in particular, voting for Cy for DA. I don't work on - or volunteer with - the Vance campaign, but I do know him personally. He's a brilliant, thoughtful attorney who cares very much about justice and getting it right.
If you don't know much about Cy (and you might not), he was a prosecutor in the Manhattan DA's office back in the day, in the rackets bureau (enterprise corruption - lots of white collar crime). He's received some flack from one of his opponents for going to Seattle after that to practice law for many years, but I think his reasoning for that - to get out of the shadow of his famous father - is a very understandable and noble one. He's been back in NYC for several years, practicing criminal defense law at a top firm, and he served on Gov. Paterson's NY sentencing reform commission.
His plan for the DA's office includes a focus on fairness, which I think is important in NY - even where there IS actual fairness, the appearance of fairness on top of that is still important to maintaining the social fabric and making people respect the system. Cy is also pro marriage equality, not that the DA has any power over that, but he's a socially liberal guy of the sort who can be at least on the public relations side of making that happen.
His plans are too much to summarize here, so I will link:
Cy's Plan for the Future
If you're still unsure who to vote for, maybe it will help that he was endorsed by all three major NY papers - something pretty unheard of:
NY Times Endorsement:
NY Times - "We Strongly Endorse Cy Vance"
[Cy] has excellent ideas for strengthening the office, by assigning prosecutors to cover particular communities, by creating a rackets bureau unit focused on public corruption, and by beefing up efforts to protect immigrants from exploitation and to help newly released offenders reintegrate into society and avoid going back to prison.
Daily News Endorsement:
Daily News Endorses Cy Vance
And I'll even put the Post's endorsement, not that Murdoch's rag needs more traffic:
Vance for Manhattan DA by NY Post
He's also been endorsed by some other NYC papers, like the Amsterdam News, El Diario and Crain's Business.
List of Cy Vance endorsements
You'll notice this diary is all about Cy. I'm not into slinging mud at the others in this race. Just here to get a few more Cy voters out there.
So go vote for Cy, Manhattanites! (Sadly, I live in Brooklyn, so I can't even do that!)