Former Suffolk County prosecutor slapped with two-year law license suspension for withholding key evidence

A panel of state judges has taken the unusual step of stripping a former Suffolk County prosecutor of his law license for withholding key evidence in a 2013 home invasion murder case.

Glenn Kurtzrock, who resigned from the Suffolk district attorney’s office in 2017, was stripped of his license for two years by a five-judge grievance panel overseeing courts in Suffolk and Nassau counties, records show.

“(Kurtzrock) committed serious misconduct that undermines the public’s trust in the justice system,” the panel found, according to the filing.

Prosecutors are not usually penalized for violations during a pretrial discovery period, where facts of the case are exchanged.

“It’s very rare, but I question whether it was harsh,” said Joel Rudin, a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer.

“In my mind, that kind of fraud is a crime. If a criminal defense lawyer did something like that, he’d go to prison. One of the problems is that the grievance committees we have in New York and other states very rarely punish prosecutors.”

The panel found there was “no showing Kurtzrock engaged in similar conduct in any other cases.”

But the Innocence Project sued in 2019 seeking access to files of five other cases he handled, including that of Shawn Lawrence, who was exonerated of murder charges and freed from a 75-year sentence.

The panel’s decision involved the prosecution of Messiah Booker, indicted in 2015 for a deadly home invasion. Booker was charged as the gunman based on statements from a teenage girl in the home, his ex-girlfriend — who said she drove him to the house and heard him make incriminating statements — and his own brother.

Booker’s lawyer, Brendan Ahern, filed the discovery requests for evidence that would help the defendant’s case. And from 2015 up to the 2017 trial, Kurtzrock insisted all relevant material had been turned over, the panel’s decision states.

But the panel found Kurtzrock didn’t turn over material indicating another man may have been the gunman — and that the teen witness was on strong medication for depression and repeatedly changed her story. In addition, Booker’s ex-girlfriend told another detective she “had no idea what was going on” inside the house.

There was also a two-year gap in notebooks kept by the detective on the case, though he was working on the case the whole time.

In all, the panel found 48 instances of material that should have been turned over. Booker’s lawyers said it seemed like there’d been a “surgical removal” of anything favorable to the defense.

At the height of trial in May 2017, the Suffolk DA’s office dismissed the murder charge and offered a much lighter plea deal, essentially short-circuiting a fuller inquiry by the trial judge. Booker agreed to plead guilty to attempted burglary and got five years in prison. Kurtzrock resigned from the DA’s office the same day.

Kurtzrock, now in private practice, acknowledged his responsibility but had argued for public censure. The panel concluded the harsher penalty was necessary.

“(Kurtzrock) abdicated his duty as a public officer to ensure that justice shall be done and allowed his advocacy role to eclipse and supplant his role as a public officer,” the judges found.

Booker, now 35, was released on parole in May 2019.