ITHACA, N.Y. –– Prominent Ithaca attorney Ed Kopko has announced he is running for Tompkins County District Attorney against the current DA Matt Van Houten.
This will be the second time that Kopko will be running against Van Houten –– he ran as an Independent in 2016. The 2016 race was contentious, with Kopko saying that the Democrats unofficially and unfairly planned the nomination in advance, after former District Attorney Gwen Wilkinson resigned from her job one day after the date party primaries would have been mandated.
This time, Kopko is running as a Democrat, challenging Van Houten in the primary.
Kopko hopes to differentiate himself from his opponent by promising sweeping changes to the office.
“I’m running for district attorney because I want to bring a thoroughly progressive view to the criminal justice system in Tompkins County,” Kopko said. “That means very substantial changes for the way that things have been done in the past.”
Kopko has had a lengthy law career of more than 30 years. An Alaska native, he graduated from the University of Alaska, after which he earned law degree from Syracuse University College of Law. Kopko went on to practice law in Philadelphia for half his career, where he also served as an assistant district attorney.
Kopko has lived and worked in Ithaca since 1999, handling numerous high-profile civil rights and police misconduct cases — including the 2019 case against Rose DeGroat who was charged with assault following an incident on the Commons that sparked controversy last year, as activists claimed racial bias within the police department. As well as the case against the Ithaca Police Department in which it was deemed excessive force was used against Ithaca College student Kyle Goldstein. He is also representing Christine Barksdale, whom the City of Ithaca recently took steps to fire.
The three main tenets of Kopko’s campaign are a community Advisory Board, a Misconduct Investigative Unit and an Independent Investigative Unit.
If elected, Kopko says his “advisory board” would be prominent local leaders who would take part in the selection of DA assistants that properly reflect the community’s interests.
“Women, blacks, minorities — whatever we have in our community,” he said. “I think this would be of immense interest of people to be able to participate in the selection of assistants who have a great deal of discretion. Discretion has to be informed by community values.”
Kopko stressed the need for representation.
“The role of the district attorney can be distilled into two basic decisions. Who is going to be prosecuted and for what crimes. There are vast implications for those two decisions,” Kopko said. “We live in a diverse community…there is no diversity in the District Attorneys office.”
Additionally, Kopko’s proposed Misconduct Investigative Unit would seek to identify and prosecute “dishonest law enforcement officers and dishonorable police behavior.”
Kopko points to DA Van Houten’s close relationship with local law enforcement as a problem in the status quo.
“What we have here is circumstances where the district attorney will not prosecute police officers, he has disqualified himself in the case of Scott Walters, disqualified himself in the case of Kyle Paolangeli –– I would never do that,” he said. “That policy creates in the view of the public that there is partiality between the DA and the police because of some so-called “working relationship”…the public feels a denial of justice because they can’t get a fair shot.”
Although he’s critical of Van Houten, Kopko, an ex-Alaskan police officer himself, stressed he is not an adversary of law enforcement.
“I would support the police every way that I could with political influence but I would also do my job by being fair to everybody,” Kopko said. “If you have this rare, rogue cop –– and they are rare, these are not the normal cops, those people get investigated.”
The last piece of Kopko’s three-part campaign platform is the Independent Investigative Unit –– a unit of investigators who, “thoroughly review all evidence and present the facts before charging an individual.” The unit will additionally review “any post-conviction claims of innocence, using credible and verifiable evidence” to free the wrongly convicted.
“Right now, all the investigators in the district attorney’s office are former police officers, I think that’s unhealthy. There needs to be clear delineation between the duties of the DA and law enforcement so what you’re getting at the end in my office is an extremely prosecutable case,” Kopko said.
Kopko believes that law enforcement’s primary function is to make arrests, while the DA looks into patterns of criminality and builds cases against criminals. He singled out sex crimes and violent crimes, which have high rates of recidivism.
“There are people that need to be separated from us…the district attorney needs to do justice.”
Current District Attorney Matt Van Houten announced on Monday morning that he intends to run for re-election.
Disclosure: Edward E. Kopko is a sponsor of The Ithaca Voice. His sponsorship has no influence on coverage of his campaign or his work as an attorney. For more information on our Editorial Independence Policy, click here. For more information on Mr. Kopko’s sponsorship and our past coverage of him, click here.