Courts

On a warm Friday evening in April of 2001, Isaac Chehebar was winding down from what had been a very typical day for him. He had just returned from visiting his grandmother, as he did every Friday before sundown and the Jewish Sabbath, when he ran into Abraham Feldman, a friend from the Gravesend neighborhood in southern Brooklyn, where Chehebar lived with his parents and siblings.

Feldman had been driving around in his father’s 2000 Porsche Carrera, and he invited Chehebar to take it for a spin. Moments later, onlookers and other motorists would witness the 20 year old racing through the quiet neighborhood’s streets, at speeds ranging from 50 to 65 miles per hour.

“I thought I was so cool with that car,” Chehebar later recalled, “that I could drive any way I wanted to – in and out of lanes.”

Ocean Parkway has a speed limit of 30 miles per hour, partly because the median separating the main artery from the adjacent service road doubles as a neighborhood park. On pleasant days it fills up with pedestrians, mostly area residents making their way to and from the nearby shopping district. Chehebar’s joy-ride included at least two laps up and down this parkway, where people were sure to notice him driving the silver sportscar.

It was on the second lap, after Chehebar had made a U-turn and was driving south, that Rima Shetman noticed him. The light at the intersection of Ocean Parkway and Avenue X had turned red, and she was waiting to cross the street with her husband Aleksandr and daughters Inna and Svetlana. “Look at this guy,” she said, as Chehebar approached the red light. It was the last thing 15-year-old Inna and her 10-year-old sister Svetlana would hear their mother say.

Chehebar had been weaving in and out of each lane to keep the Porsche moving through the mildly congested traffic. When he reached the intersection where Rima Shetman stood with her family, he was traveling more than 50 miles per hour, according to the motorists he passed, and there were no openings ahead of him. To avoid a car that had the right-of-way and was clearing the intersection from the opposite direction, he cut the wheel hard to the right, losing control of the Porsche, sliding into the median and striking Inna, Svetlana and Rima Shetman. Aleksandr Shetman ran after the Porsche, screaming, as it carried his family several feet before coming to a stop against a park bench and a tree.

The force of the impact killed Inna Shetman instantly; her sister Svetlana died hours later at Coney Island Hospital. Their mother, Rima Shetman, sustained major trauma to her head and torso along with multiple fractures in her arms and paralysis of her right leg. She would survive only after several tenuous months at Lutheran Medical Center.

When the car finally came to a stop, Chehebar stepped out, over the body of Inna Shetman. He and Feldman had escaped with cuts and bruises.

On May 25, 2001, a grand jury at New York State Supreme Court in Brooklyn indicted Chehebar on 11 counts, including two each of second-degree manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide. Although a conviction on these charges would have been enough to warrant several years behind bars, Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes arranged a plea bargain with Chehebar that spared him a lengthy prison sentence. On Feb. 26, 2002 Chehebar pleaded guilty to both counts of criminally negligent homicide in exchange for which Hynes dropped the remaining nine charges and sought a six-month sentence as opposed to a six-year sentence. Chehebar ultimately served four months on Rikers’ Island, from March to July of 2002, followed by two years of house arrest. He was also sentenced to 1,200 hours of community service and prohibited from driving for five years.

In the years since Isaac’s plea bargain, nearly $80,000 has flowed from friends, neighbors and business associates of the Chehebar family to Hynes’s campaign coffers. In recent months, the plea bargain and subsequent donations have come under scrutiny by Hynes’s opponents, including State Sen. John Sampson and former Assistant District Attorney Arnold Kriss, both of whom attempted to unseat him during last September’s Democratic primary. In response to the allegations of misconduct, Hynes has pointed out that the victims’ families, including Aleksandr Shetman who lost his only children, endorsed this deal.

Between 2001 and 2005 more than 30 members of Sephardic Bikur Holim, the Brooklyn synagogue where the Chehebar family worships, contributed a total of nearly $80,000 to the Hynes campaign, as shown by comparing Hynes’s campaign-finance disclosures to the Sephardic Bikur Holim web site. The Chehebar family owns the well-known Rainbow Apparel shops based in Brooklyn and founded the Accessory Network Group, which does approximately $160 million in business annually according to Brandweek, an advertising-industry magazine that profiled the company.

The family of MartinStein, vice president of the Accessory Network Group, gave $6,100. Weeplay Kids, a children’s clothing store owned by Alan Maleh, a fellow Sephardic Bikur member, contributed $10,100. The Chera family, also Sephardic Bikur members, donated $11,000 to Hynes. Sampson has called these donations “blood money,” adding, “It tells people that if you have money, you don’t have to face justice.”

The allegations of impropriety come at a difficult time for the embattled district attorney, who has fended off two strenuous challenges to his incumbency in the years since he stuck a deal with Chehebar. In 2001, Sandra Roper, a little-known civil rights lawyer, won 37 percent of the vote, mounting the first credible challenge to Hynes’s decade-long tenure. Last year, State Sen. John Sampson won the same percentage, in a race pitting Hynes against three opponents. These near-misses were no small feat for Hynes’s challengers; to date, no incumbent district attorney in any of the five boroughs’ history has ever been defeated for reelection. Moreover, Hynes is a well-known figure in Brooklyn politics, having garnered celebrity status and wide respect in 1986 as the special prosecutor in the well-publicized Howard Beach racial murder trial.

Although Hynes and Maureen McCormick, the assistant district attorney who prosecuted this case both declined to be interviewed for this article, they have pointed out that the victims of the Chehebar accident supported the offer of a lighter sentence, agreeing that Chehebar deserved a “second chance,” according to court records.

“Mr. Hynes feels very strongly that the victims of this crime should be heard in terms of whether or not they accept the disposition,” McCormick said at Chehebar’s plea hearing. She then asked Aleksandr Shetman, “Is it your intention, by accepting this plea offer, to extend to the defendant a second chance to get his life together and do some good out of this horrible incident?” Although Shetman answered yes, he later told the New York Post that he was disappointed and had only agreed because he worried that Chehebar would not be convicted in a trial.

A review of press releases from the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office shows that six cases involving vehicular deaths were prosecuted by Hynes from 2000 to 2005. One of those cases resulted in “the longest sentence in state history for a sober driver who killed someone,” according to a press release from Hynes’s office. Hynes and McCormick won a second-degree murder conviction against Jon Paul Lazartes after his Mercedes crashed into another car, crushing its two passengers to death.

“Let this be a clear message to these high-octane terrorists on the Belt Parkway and everywhere in Brooklyn, that you will be penalized in a similar fashion for this kind of behind-the-wheel-bedlam,” Hynes said of the 20-year sentence Lazartes received. Like Chehebar, Lazartes was 20 at the time of the accident and 21 at the time of sentencing.

At the same time, almost everyone involved in the criminal justice system has an incentive to plea bargain. Because plea-bargained cases move faster – taking weeks to months instead of years – judges are able to better handle their over-booked courts. For prosecutors, plea bargains guarantee a conviction and wrapping up cases quickly conserves resources, which are often scarce. New York City district attorneys suffered budget cuts of 12 percent between 2001 and 2004, according to a report issued by the Citizens’ Union. Hynes’s office lost roughly 39 percent of its assistant district attorneys in the same time period.

According to both Harvard and Yale Law Reviews, more than 90 percent of convictions in the U.S. come from pleas, many of which are negotiated. “Plea bargains are generally encouraged by the court system, and have become something of a necessity due to over burdened criminal court calendars and over-crowded jails,” according to Find Law, a web site that provides legal advice to non-professionals .

On the day of his sentencing, Chehebar addressed the court. “I know no matter what I say to the family it will never bring back his daughters,” he said, “But this past year has been hell for me.” He also expressed appreciation for the leniency and asked Aleksandr Shetman for forgiveness, saying that he was “filled with guilt.”

After four months on Riker’s Island , Chehebar returned home and went back to work for his family’s company. In July of 2003, he was caught trying to obtain a driver’s license. As punishment, Justice Anne Feldman of Kings County State Supreme Court, who oversaw his case, revoked his permission to spend weekends at his family’s shore house in New Jersey.

In August of the same year, Chehebar was found guilty of cheating on his community service. Despite warnings from both McCormick and Feldman that any violations would result in jail time, he was sentenced to additional community service.

In an interview from 2004, included with the court transcripts, Chehebar sought to portray himself, not as a criminal, but as another victim in the accident that killed Inna and Svetlana. “I felt I did not deserve the sentence I received,” he said. “I come from a good family with good values.”