A New York City judge dismissed felony convictions against 133 people Thursday over misleading testimony given by a former NYPD detective. Joseph Franco, who worked on the specific cases between 2011 and 2015, was indicted in 2019 after prosecutors said he lied in testimony and paperwork about seeing drug deals that never took place. “His compromised credibility suggests a lack of due process in the prosecution of these defendants, and we cannot stand behind these convictions,” said Darcel Clark, the Bronx district attorney, in a statement to NBC News. Franco was fired from the department in 2020. Since then, prosecutors across multiple city boroughs—including Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx—have since worked to reverse convictions tied to Franco’s testimony. Only cases that relied heavily on Franco’s word will be tossed, Clark said.
