FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tuesday, June 19, 2018
Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez Announces
New Members of His Executive Team
NYPD Deputy Commissioner, Former Federal Prosecutor and Law Professor, Criminal Justice Reform Advocate and Former Deputy Director at the ACLU Join Veterans of the DA’s Office
Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez today announced the hiring of four new members of his executive team. Nancy Hoppock, an Assistant Deputy Commissioner at the NYPD, will serve as Chief Assistant District Attorney. Tali Farhadian Weinstein, a former federal prosecutor and law professor, was appointed General Counsel. Meg Reiss, Executive Director at the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, will be the Director of Social Justice. Jill Harris, formerly of the ACLU, the Drug Policy Alliance and the Legal Aid Society, will continue her role as Policy and Strategy Counsel. They join newly-appointed Chief of Staff Maritza Ming, and Joseph Alexis and Renee Gregory – who assume new positions – as the District Attorney’s Executive Team. Together with the entire staff, they will help the DA implement his vision of criminal justice reform.
District Attorney Gonzalez said, “I am committed to keeping Brooklyn safe and strengthening community trust in the criminal justice system – and these new members of my team will help in achieving these goals. They bring a wealth of diverse experience and fresh perspectives from the court room, law enforcement, academia and the advocacy community so I have no doubt that they will serve as great assets for the DA’s Office and for the people of Brooklyn.”
Nancy Hoppock will be joining the Office as Chief Assistant and will be supervising its operations, investigations and case resolutions. She has spent the last several years developing policy and implementing reforms as General Counsel and Assistant Deputy Commissioner at the NYPD’s Risk Management Bureau. Prior to that, she was the Executive Director of the NYU Center on the Administration of Criminal Law where, in addition to directing research and technical support on best practices in the criminal justice system, she established and ran a federal clemency project.
Hoppock started her career in 1994 at the New York County District Attorney’s Office, where she prosecuted a range of offenses, and later led the criminal divisions at the United States Attorney’s Office for the district of New Jersey and at the New York State Attorney General’s Office.
Tali Farhadian Weinstein, most recently a Distinguished Senior Fellow at NYU Law School’s Center on the Administration of Criminal Law and an Adjunct Professor of Law at the law school, joined the Office as General Counsel. In this role, she will advise the District Attorney on ethics and professional responsibility, best practices, appeals, conviction review, police accountability and a host of other issues. A graduate of Yale College and Oxford University, which she attended as a Rhodes Scholar, Farhadian Weinstein obtained her J.D. from Yale Law School and then served as a law clerk for Chief Judge Merrick B. Garland at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (2003-04) and for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor at the Supreme Court of the United States (2004-06).
In 2009, she joined the United States Department of Justice. As Counsel to the Attorney General of the United States, she advised former Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr. on a range of issues, and worked closely with senior officials at the White House and executive agencies. She later became an Assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District of New York, where she investigated and prosecuted federal crimes, including violent crimes, narcotics trafficking, national security matters, and public corruption. In addition to teaching a course on Criminal Justice Innovation at NYU Law School, Farhadian Weinstein has also taught immigration law and policy at Columbia Law School and worked in private practice.
Meg Reiss, most recently the Executive Director at the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, will serve as Director of Social Justice. In this position, she will make sure the Brooklyn DA’s Office is pursuing non-jail dispositions in as many cases as possible, and will be designing and driving a ground-breaking Community Justice Initiative, in which the Office will team up with communities to see that cases are resolved in ways to meet these communities’ needs. She will also lead other implementations of the DA’s Justice 2020 initiatives.
Reiss started her career as a prosecutor in the Brooklyn DA’s Office and later served as Chief Assistant in the Nassau County DA’s Office, where she worked to broaden that office’s role to include crime prevention and criminal justice reform. She also served as a deputy monitor on a team that supervised the Los Angeles Police Department’s compliance with a federal consent decree and was later part of a panel that oversaw London’s Metropolitan Police Service.
Jill Harris joined the Brooklyn DA’s Office last November as Policy and Strategy Counsel and has been serving as the Director of the Justice 2020 Initiative to create an action plan to make the Brooklyn DA’s Office a national model of prosecutorial reform. She has also been advising the District Attorney on drug policy, bail reform and other issues. She brings to her critical assignment over 30 years’ experience in the criminal justice field.
Harris was the Deputy Director of the ACLU’s Campaign for Smart Justice, where she concentrated on state-level reforms and on strategies to elect and support progressive prosecutors around the country. Prior to that, she worked for six years at the Drug Policy Alliance as the Managing Director of Policy and Strategic Initiatives. A graduate of Harvard University and New York University School of Law, she began her legal career in 1985 as a trial attorney at the Legal Aid Society, Criminal Defense Division. She spent 13 years working in its Manhattan, Brooklyn and Eastern District Federal Defender offices, including two years as the Attorney-in-Charge of the Manhattan office.
The District Attorney additionally announced that Maritza Ming, formerly Counsel to the District Attorney who has been part of the Office for over 20 years, has been promoted to Chief of Staff. She is replacing Leroy Frazer Jr., who is retiring after 37 years in public service, the last four in the Brooklyn DA’s Office. Ming will supervise the day-to-day operations of the Office. Renee Gregory will be taking up a new role as Chief Diversity Officer to design, coordinate and implement a number of diversity initiatives to keep the Office’s policies in line with best practices and maintain a diverse work force. Joseph Alexis has been named Executive Assistant District Attorney in charge of the Trial Division. He will supervise the Trial Zones, Homicide and Cold Case Bureaus, as well court operations, and will ensure that the Justice 2020 reforms are communicated to the entire staff and drive all decisions.
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