Manhattan DA's office will ask judge to dismiss all DSK charges: source
By LAURA ITALIANO
Last Updated: 7:23 AM, August 21, 2011
The Manhattan DA's Office will ask a judge to dismiss all charges against Dominique Strauss-Kahn when he appears in court Tuesday, The Post has learned.
Prosecutors are poised to file what's called a Dismissal On Recommendation motion, which will say the indictment against the frisky Frenchman cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt because of credibility problems with the sole witness in the case, Strauss-Kahn's hotel-maid accuser.
Prosecution sources said the motion, also called a Recommendation for Dismissal, will be lengthy, thorough and carefully crafted.
HE'LL SKATE:The Manhattan DA has decided to seek a dismissal of all sex-assault charges against Dominique Strauss-Kahn due to a lack of credibility of his accuser, hotel maid Nafissatou Diallo.
It will set out the facts of the case, possibly including a procedural chronology and details of DA Cyrus Vance Jr.'s labor-intensive, four-month investigation into the strength -- and failings -- of the evidence.
One source believes the dismissal motion will include never-before-revealed details attacking the credibility of accuser Nafissatou Diallo, in addition to details already revealed by prosecutors in a June 30 filing describing her previous lies to federal asylum and tax officials and then to prosecutors and grand jurors in the Strauss-Kahn case.
The motion will conclude that the indictment prosecutors won in May against the then-International Monetary Fund honcho -- alleging that he forced Diallo to give him oral sex and attempted to rape her when she came to clean his luxury suite at the Sofitel hotel in Midtown -- cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
Most important, the motion will ask Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Michael Obus, who has handled the matter since Strauss-Kahn's arraignment days after the arrest, to dismiss the indictment.
Judges always grant such motions immediately, experts said, meaning that DSK could hop any of the next planes home -- although one defense source said that since the DA's office has yet to reveal with certainty its plan for Tuesday, the Frenchman isn't packing his bags just yet.
"When it's the DA asking for dismissal, it's never denied," said veteran defense lawyer Michael Shapiro, who got a motion to dismiss in Manhattan last year after prosecutors realized they'd wrongly won a child-rape indictment against an upstate rabbi.
"I suppose a judge technically could deny it," Shapiro said. "But then no one would show up to prosecute the case on the next court date."
Shapiro -- who has been a defense lawyer for 38 years, acting as co-counsel for such big clients as Bernard Goetz and Vincent "Chin" Gigante -- called prosecutor motions to dismiss "as rare as hen's teeth."
The motion that Manhattan prosecutors submitted last year for Shapiro's much-relieved rabbi client was short and sweet, the lawyer said.
"All mine said was that, upon further investigation, the DA's office had determined that it is unable to prove the charges beyond a reasonable doubt," so the judge should dismiss the indictment, Shapiro said.
Defense lawyer Ron Kuby, who won a three-page motion to dismiss in a Bronx murder case in 2008, said, "They're incredibly scarce and valuable. The judge approved it on the spot, and the entire case was then sealed."
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/source_to_drop_dsk_rap_31ojnTxU9N4v6ykxpntQOL#ixzz1Vf9vHmDP
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