No Prosecutorial Experience? These D.A. Candidates Say That’s an Asset.

Tahanie Aboushi, Eliza Orlins and Dan Quart are running behind a broad rethinking of how the criminal justice system should work.

The only two men who have led the Manhattan district attorney’s office over the last 45 years were scions of the establishment, leading the country’s most prominent local prosecutor’s office with a traditional emphasis on fighting crime. Yet Eliza Orlins, Tahanie Aboushi and Dan Quart, three candidates running to be the next district attorney, have consistently argued that if voters want the criminal justice system to change, they should be wary of anyone who has ties to the establishment — or any experience at all as a prosecutor. In cities around the country, a wave of prosecutorial candidates has won elections by pledging to do less harm to defendants who commit low-level crimes. The nonprosecutorial candidates in Manhattan have taken up that argument, and advanced it, adding that only a leader whose perspective is unblemished by a history of putting people behind bars can make the system less punitive and less racist.