3 hours ago
1
About 90 prosecutors have quit the Nassau County District Attorney’s Office since Anne Donnelly took it over in 2022, says her political challenger — who left the job herself, citing a “dictator”-like atmosphere.
Nicole Aloise, a Democrat running against the GOP incumbent Donnelly for DA, called out her opponent Friday outside the county courthouse in Mineola, LI — accusing Donnelly of fostering a toxic work culture focused more on headlines than justice.
“I left the Nassau DAs office after truly believing I would be there for life,” said Aloise, who quit there in 2023. “I loved serving the community, ensuring that victims were heard and perpetrators were brought to justice.
“Once Anne Donnelly took office — the job changed — it was no longer about justice, it was about her own agenda.”
Donnelly’s camp fired back by calling her political foe and the other former assistant district attorneys “ethically challenged, soft-on-crime prosecutors like Nicole Aloise.”
Aloise said she was one of the roughly 90 prosecutors in the office pushed to quit their jobs under Donnelly, claiming one of the reasons she left is because she was denied the resources she requested to try to expand a murder prosecution into a larger conspiracy case.
Some of the other former prosecutors said the alleged internal dismal culture shift under Donnelly also drove them out.
They wrote to Aloise sharing similar accounts, including breakdowns in collaboration, shrinking support for long-term investigations and what they saw as a growing focus on politics over prosecution.
“You can either treat us like s–t or pay us like s–t, you can’t do both — Donnelly did,” a former prosecutor told The Post under the promise of anonymity.
Aloise also cited a 44% spike in basic crimes during Donnelly’s first two years in office — the highest level since 2013 — and attacked the DA for having the office’s lowest felony conviction rate since 2014.
County officials have touted a 25% drop in major crimes at the start of 2025, but Aloise argued that short-term improvements don’t erase what she called a breakdown in leadership and the long-term damage to the justice system.
But some local authorities blame the previous jump in crime and drop in convictions on former President Joe Biden’s border policies and New York’s “soft-on-crime” laws, even going as far as previously calling Dem Gov. Kathy Hochul and her political party “pro-criminal.”
Donnelly’s office contended that the prosecutors who quit their assistant district attorney posts also fit that description — and it said good riddance, framing their departures as a purge.
“The only exodus of attorneys, thankfully, have been by ethically challenged, soft-on-crime prosecutors like Nicole Aloise,” DA spokesman Mike Deery told The Post.
“Under District Attorney Anne Donnelly’s watch, Nassau has been recognized as the safest community in the USA,” he said. “The only exodus of attorneys, thankfully, has been by ethically challenged, soft-on-crime prosecutors like Nicole Aloise.”
Deery said his boss has been focused on rebuilding the office with prosecutors who support her tough-on-crime approach and restoring public trust.
He said Aloise has been previously accused of “unethical conduct, corruption and abuse of power” after a group of law professors filed a formal ethics complaint in 2021 accusing her of prosecutorial misconduct during her time as an ADA in Queens over her father, Justice Michael Aloise.
The complaint was eventually dismissed, according to a state letter obtained by The Post.
Aloise’s camp told The Post in a statement, “If Anne Donnelly was a competent District Attorney and actually believed she had that many unethical employees, she’d have fired them rather than watch them flee her office en masse.
“Facts matter,” the statement said, pointing out that the stats used to determine Nassau County as the safest in the country are from 2014 and 2016 — before Donnelly took office.
English (US)