Two former narcotics detectives will not face any jail time after cuffing an 18-year-old Coney Island woman in Gravesend, and then releasing her in exchange for sex in 2017.
Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Danny Chun indicated he will sentence defendants Eddie Martins, 39, and Richard Hall, 34, to five years probation after the one-time cops plead guilty to charges including third-degree bribe receiving and official misconduct on Thursday, according to District Attorney Eric Gonzalez.
Gonzalez — who advocated for a prison sentence of up to three years — objected to Chun’s anticipated slap-on-the-wrist, and lamented the fact that new legislation prohibiting police from having sex with people in their custody — which was crafted as a direct response the defendants’ lurid crime — cannot be applied retroactively to the case that inspired it.
“These defendants engaged in a shocking abuse of power which they finally acknowledged,” he said. “We could not apply the new law retroactively… yet we remained committed to holding these defendants accountable.”
Justice Chun declined to comment regarding the sentence.
Martins and Hall were members of the Police Department’s Brooklyn South Narcotics team when they cuffed the teenage victim in Gravesend in September 2017, claiming they spotted marijuana and two prescription pills in her car. The detectives then offered to release the woman in exchange for sexual favors, which they accepted in the back of their police van parked in Calvert Vaux Park, according to the DA’s office.
Investigators matched DNA recovered from the victim’s body to both Martins and Hall, and nearby video surveillance shows the woman exiting the police van about 40 minutes after her arrest, prosecutors claim.
Gonzalez initially charged the detectives with rape and kidnapping, but choose to drop those charges in March due to “unforeseen and serious credibility issues” with the woman’s testimony, which reportedly contained a “series of false, misleading, and inconsistent statements about the facts of the case,” said Oren Yaniv, a spokesman for the district attorney’s office.
Following the dismissal of the more serious charges, Martins and Hall plead guilty to all remaining charges in the indictment, allowing them to accept a plea deal offered by the court — without prosecutor’s consent, according to Gonzalez.
