Pandemic, Summer of Protests Led Former Manhattan ADA to Join 2021 District Attorney Race

Lucy Lang, who has 12 years of experience as an assistant DA, joins a crowded field. Incumbent DA Cyrus Vance Jr. has not announced whether he will seek reelection.

By Jane Wester

August 12, 2020

Originally published in New York Law Journal

The already crowded 2021 Manhattan district attorney race added another name this week when Lucy Lang, a longtime assistant district attorney, announced her candidacy.

Lang left the DA’s office in 2018, after 12 years, and she has since served as director of the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

She joins New York State Assembly member Dan Quart, D-Manhattan, former New York State Chief Deputy Attorney General Alvin Bragg, criminal defense attorney Liz Crotty, former Brooklyn DA’s Office general counsel Tali Farhadian Weinstein, public defender Eliza Orlins, civil rights attorney Tahanie Aboushi and civil rights attorney and organizer Janos Marton in the race to potentially replace incumbent DA Cyrus Vance Jr.

Vance is also eligible to run for reelection; a spokeswoman confirmed Wednesday that his plans for 2021 are “still undetermined.”

Lang said the “incredible energy and urgency of change” of the summer’s protests against police brutality and for racial justice helped inspire her to run, along with the turbulence of the coronavirus pandemic.

“I am running because I’m so mindful of the full potential of what a district attorney can really do in terms of prioritizing the prevention of crime, supporting communities, upholding racial and gender equity and really focusing on dignity for everyone who touches the system,” she said.

In 2017, while working in the DA’s office, Lang helped create a prison education course she described as “first-of-its-kind,” allowing ADAs to study criminal justice alongside state inmates. When the pandemic reached New York, she said she couldn’t stop thinking about the incarcerated students in the program and the health risks they faced.

“The pandemic is, in some ways, the most important backdrop for the need to use the potential for government to support communities in New York and elsewhere across the country and world, because it’s highlighted so many of the disparities in all of our social services,” she said. “And criminal justice has become a backstop for so many of those social challenges, and it’s kind of rendered in stark relief right now how incredibly damaging that is to communities.”

As district attorney, Lang said she would develop a full-time staff focused on restorative justice to ensure that more cases are handled with a trauma-informed approach and involve collaboration from affected communities.

One incident early in her career as an ADA helped shape her thinking, Lang said. After a teenager was shot, she worked with him and his family to have him testify before the grand jury and ensure the shooter was arrested, but within two weeks, she learned the victim himself had been arrested for a retaliatory shooting.

“It really highlighted for me, many years ago, that what we were doing to solve the problem wasn’t actually solving problems at their core,” she said. “And I think that what is needed is a little bit of a bird’s eye view of these cases that both thinks about the long-term effects on communities and also focuses on the individuals that are involved, what their needs are and provides support.”