On the morning of May 3, 2017, Suffolk County prosecutor Glenn Kurtzrock was preparing to call the lead detective in a murder case — his final witness — when the defense attorney noticed something odd.
There was a two-year gap in the detective’s memo book.
Kurtzrock told the defense attorney the content wasn’t germane because he had no plans to ask the detective about the missing material. The court ordered Kurtzrock to produce the pages.
In the days that followed, it became clear that Kurtzrock had withheld other materials, including some that pointed to other possible suspects and called a witness account into question. Within the week, he was forced to resign.
Kurtzrock’s conduct in that case — and in others that were subsequently reviewed — led to the dismissal of five murder charges, a man’s exoneration after years of wrongful imprisonment and multiple disciplinary proceedings. His law license was eventually suspended.
Nearly a decade after resigning, Kurtzrock has been trying to get the license back, but a group of law professors is trying to block his return.
On Friday, professors from six prominent law schools submitted a formal complaint, first shared with Gothamist, to New York’s Commission on Prosecutorial Conduct. They’re asking the commission to refer Kurtzrock’s conduct to a state grievance committee for the third time — with a recommendation to disbar him.
They argue that the “breadth and gravity of Kurtzrock’s misconduct are staggering” and that the system has never fully reckoned with the worst of his behavior.
“Any prosecutorial misconduct should be taken to the commission because that’s what it was created for,” said Cynthia Godsoe, a professor at Brooklyn Law School and one of the letter’s signatories. “But this one is, you know, so extreme — like extremely egregious — and also has been through procedures that are supposed to be safeguards that haven’t worked.”
Whether the commission will act is far from certain. The body was formed in 2021, has only had an administrator and lacks any power to directly discipline prosecutors. To date, its only public action has been to recommend that an upstate district attorney be censured for her behavior during a traffic stop.
Public court records indicate that Kurtzrock recently filed a motion seeking readmission to the state bar. In December, the court denied that motion but allowed him to resubmit in three months. Kurtzrock’s attorney, David Besso, was also recently quoted in the New York Law Journal noting his client could “put in an application for being reinstated.”
A Yelp page for Kurtzrock’s practice indicated recently it would reopen April 1, but he told Gothamist by email that wasn’t accurate. He said Yelp’s system requires opening dates less than a year away, so he periodically refreshes it, but that he’d update it further “in the event my license is restored.” The Yelp page later showed a reopening date of April 1, 2027.
He didn’t respond to questions about the professors’ concerns or any plans to pursue a reinstatement of his license.
Legal ethics experts say Kurtzrock’s potential return is less about a failure to hold one man accountable and more an indictment of a system that allows misconduct to fester.
“If a prosecutor who blatantly and repeatedly abuses his power and the public trust, ruining people’s lives, is not disbarred for that kind of conduct, what kind of grievance system do we have in New York?” said Ellen Yaroshefsky, a professor at Hofstra University and a prominent legal ethics expert. “ This is a perfect case for disbarment and New York has not done that.”
‘A Pandora’s box’
Kurtzrock first drew scrutiny in 2017 during the murder trial of 32-year-old Messiah Booker, who had been charged with fatally shooting a man during a home invasion in Flanders four years earlier. After defense attorneys found they had not been given a full record of the lead detective’s memo book, “a Pandora’s box was opened,” the latest complaint states.
New withheld materials came to light: written reports and interview notes that identified an alternative suspect and notes from an interview with a key witness that revealed the witness was under the influence of a powerful prescription medication.
The defense argued the withholdings amounted to a “surgical extraction of exculpatory evidence.”
Within a week, Kurtzrock was forced to resign from the Suffolk County district attorney’s office. A spokesperson called his behavior “inexcusable.” Kurtzrock’s replacement dismissed the murder charges against Booker as well as second-degree murder charges against Booker’s three co-defendants.
The matter was ultimately referred to the state’s grievance committee system. What followed was a secret disciplinary process — standard procedure under New York law, which bars public access to proceedings unless the Appellate Division imposes punishment.
Three years later, in December 2020, the Appellate Division did just that, suspending Kurtzrock for two years, but not revoking his license outright. The court based the ruling in part on the belief that while Kurtzrock had “committed extensive misconduct in one case, there was no showing that he engaged in any similar conduct in any other cases.”
However, even as the grievance proceeding was underway, another Kurtzrock case had already unraveled.
In 2018, a judge freed Shawn Lawrence after he had spent six years in prison for a shooting he had always maintained he hadn’t committed. The judge cited conduct that was eerily similar to what had gone on during the Booker case.
The withheld materials in his case, according to court records, included notes pointing to alternative suspects, evidence undermining the credibility of key witnesses and records showing Kurtzrock had secretly paid a prosecution witness thousands of dollars.
The judge called Kurtzrock’s conduct in that prosecution “absolutely stunning” and found it amounted to “more than ‘exceptionally serious misconduct.’”
Lawrence later settled a federal civil rights lawsuit against Suffolk County for $3.85 million.
The Lawrence case was front and center when, in November 2021, Suffolk County District Attorney Timothy Sini released a report by his Conviction Integrity Bureau, conducted with the New York Law School Post-Conviction Innocence Clinic, into Kurtzrock’s conduct in at least 20 cases.
The contents were damning.
The bureau found disclosure violations in every homicide case it reviewed and in 76% of the other trial cases it reviewed, stretching back to 2006. In some cases, the additional material amounted to a single document; in others, dozens of pages.
Sini sent the report to the grievance committee for further action upon publication. In response, the committee opened a second disciplinary proceeding against Kurtzrock. Again, it was conducted entirely in secret.
A self-regulating profession
In December 2025, five years after the Conviction Integrity Bureau’s report came out, the Appellate Division issued its second disciplinary ruling: a public censure, but no further suspension.
“They all seemed to have ignored [the DA’s report],” said Gregory Diskant, a senior litigator at Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP. “I’m just flabbergasted that this happened.”
The court found misconduct in two cases — Kurtzrock failed to disclose a photo array in one and withheld statements in another. Two other instances of misconduct were also reviewed but not sustained, according to redacted court documents reviewed by Gothamist.
According to Diskant’s review of the record, which he detailed in an article for the New York Law Journal, the charges involved did not include any based on the Lawrence case. Diskant said he also confirmed with the court that the record does not include a copy of the DA’s report. Besso, Kurtzrock’s attorney, declined to comment further.
“I don’t know why the grievance committee didn’t use the DA’s report,” Diskant said in an interview. “I mean, DAs don’t file complaints about prosecutors. It’s almost unheard of.”
The grievance committee declined to comment, as well.
Two days after the Appellate Division released its decision to censure Kurtzrock, the court rejected a separate motion from Kurtzrock seeking reinstatement to the bar.
But because the court granted Kurtzrock leave to seek reinstatement in three months, the professors said they’re now hoping the Commission on Prosecutorial Conduct can refer Kurtzrock’s case to the grievance committee for the third time — with a formal recommendation of disbarment.
At the center of their complaint is a straightforward argument: that the Lawrence case, the most serious instance of misconduct in Kurtzrock’s record, has never been adjudicated.
“The whole point of not having outside regulation … of being a self-regulating profession is that supposedly we’re going to take care of our own and do the job right,” Godsoe said. “That has proven not to be true.”
The complaint was signed by eight law professors from Brooklyn Law School, Columbia, CUNY, Georgetown, Northeastern and New York Law School, including co-directors of the innocence clinic that partnered with Sini’s office on the 2021 report.
Many of these same professors had previously filed more than 50 complaints with grievance committees across the state, all based on judicial findings of prosecutorial misconduct or behavior that could constitute misconduct. So far, none has resulted in public discipline.
Stephen Gillers, an NYU law professor and expert on attorney discipline, says he isn’t aware of a prosecutor ever being disbarred for their courtroom conduct. He cautioned, however, that in such a serious case a prosecutor may resign from the bar before facing disbarment.
He, too, has been following the Kurtzrock case. The initial decision to suspend Kurtzrock’s license, Gillers said, felt like a “black swan moment.”
“I was stunned, and I immediately put the event in my case book for law students, because until that happened it was nearly unheard of,” Gillers said.
He guesses that, perhaps, the court had taken into account that Kurtzrock had already been out of practice for longer than the initial two years when it delivered its censure.
That, however, is not enough for Godsoe or the other signatories.
“Why should he be able to [practice] after he’s committed so much egregious misconduct?” Godsoe said. “Why should he be allowed in this privileged, supposedly trusted, esteemed profession?”
