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His cases have earned tabloid nicknames, including the "rape cops," a "killer nanny," and a "blowtorch hubby." In 2021, he presided over the moped hit-and-run death of Gone Girl actor Lisa Banes.
New York Supreme Court Justice Gregory Carro has had dozens of sensational — sometimes horrific — cases in his 25 years on the Manhattan criminal bench.
As early as Thursday afternoon, Carro will preside over his most high-profile media case yet, the prosecution of Luigi Mangione, who is accused of the ambush shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
With Carro on the bench in a likely-packed 13th-floor courtroom, Mangione, 26, will be officially informed of the first-degree murder indictment against him. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced Tuesday that the indictment alleges a top charge of murder as an act of terrorism.
After the charges are read, Mangione will have the chance to enter a plea of not guilty. Carro, who is expected to keep the case, will then set a next court date and order that Mangione be taken to a city jail to await that date.
A former Manhattan narcotics and homicide prosecutor, Carro was appointed to Manhattan's criminal court bench in 1998 by then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Carro is the son of retired Associate Justice John Carro, who in 1979 was the first Puerto Rican appointed as an appellate judge in New York.
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The younger Carro is known among defense lawyers at Manhattan Criminal Court as a "tough draw. "
If one lawyer tells another in a courthouse hallway, "I just learned my guy is going to be in front of Carro," another might commiserate, "Wow, that's a tough draw," veteran attorneys in the city told BI.
Prosecutors might say the opposite of Carro: "Good draw."
"Of course, in a case like this, there are no good judges," said longtime Manhattan defense attorney Ron Kuby. "You're not going to find any members of Antifa on the bench."
Kuby called Carro "harsh but not crazy," as Manhattan criminal judges go.
Five Manhattan defense lawyers interviewed by Business Insider said the judge leans pro-prosecution. None would say so on the record, because they may have cases before him in the future.
The most common descriptor among lawyers reached by BI? "No nonsense."
"He's a tough judge," said a former fellow jurist, Charles Solomon, a state Supreme Court Justice in Manhattan who retired in 2017.
"Very firm, very fair, and well-respected by his colleagues," Solomon said of Carro.
Derek French/BI
Solomon said that Carro would have been assigned as Mangione's judge through a strictly random process.
What likely happened was that on December 4, the day of Thompson's shooting, Mangione's lead prosecutor, Joel Seidemann, happened to be on call to "catch" new homicides.
Seidemann's team of prosecutors feeds all of its new cases into one of only two assigned courtrooms, and one of them was Carro's.
"This is the typical way a case gets assigned," agreed another retired state Supreme Court justice, Michael Obus, who served as a supervising judge in Manhattan Criminal Court from 2009 to 2017.
"He's a solid guy," Obus said. "He's a very good trial judge. In general, lawyers could do a lot worse than Judge Carro."
Laura Italiano / BI
At sentencings, Carro is an emphatic advocate for law, order, and victims, his many news clippings show.
"I can only imagine what memories are haunting the victim in this case and his significant other," he said last year at a recent high-profile sentencing, for the random, attempted slashing murder of a French tourist.
In 2011, Carro presided over the trial of an NYPD officer accused of raping a young fashion executive — a woman he'd been dispatched to help when she was too intoxicated to get out of her taxi.
A jury cleared the officer of rape and convicted him of official misconduct for the three caught-on-video visits he made to the woman's apartment during his shift that night.
Police misconduct offenses "rip at that fabric that holds us all together," Carro told the former officer, Kenneth Moreno, before sentencing him to a year at Rikers Island jail.
"You, sir, ripped a gaping hole in that fabric in committing those crimes."
It was Carro's biggest media case until now.
Moreno's lawyer, Joe Tacopina, was one of the lawyers to call Carro "no nonsense."
"Not easy on defendants or defense lawyers, for that matter," Tacopina said.
"Honestly, it doesn't matter what judge has this case," the former criminal attorney for President-elect Donald Trump, added. "There is such overwhelming evidence of guilt here. It is not a 'Who done it.' It is a 'Was he sane when he did it' case."
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In his most high-profile murder — dubbed the "killer nanny" case by city tabloids — Carro allowed a jury to hear the insanity defense of Yoselyn Ortega, who in 2012 fatally stabbed two young children in her care.
Defense lawyers called two psychiatrists to the stand to testify that Ortega heard voices — including Satan's — urging her to kill the children. Jurors also heard that when the mother returned home to witness the carnage in her Upper West Side bathroom, Ortega was nearby, slashing into her own throat with the murder weapon.
The jury rejected the defense.
Carro called Ortega "pure evil" at her 2018 sentencing.
Then he sentenced Ortega to life without parole for first-degree murder, the same maximum penalty Mangione faces for the same top charge in his indictment.
Last month, the New York Times reported Carro sentenced a Long Island, New York man who admitted planning to "shoot up a synagogue" to ten years prison on a plea to possessing a weapon as a crime of terrorism.
