Unity Dems should know better

To the editor:

(re: “It was all over a simple typo,” June 29)

What a strange letter Lewis Kaminski wrote in a recent edition of The Riverdale Press, equating the willful alteration of nearly 250 legal documents with a typo in The Press.

I am not a lawyer, but it’s clear that you should not modify an already-signed legal document, which presumably he learned in law school. This debacle by the Unity Democratic Club resulted in its entire slate of 18 candidates for delegates and alternates to the Democratic Judicial Convention being thrown off the ballot.

Yet again, the cover-up was worse than the crime. The Unity Club’s petition mess started with a typo, but what followed was extremely serious. They engaged in an unauthorized and improper alteration of every single page of the petitions by using a case of Wite-Out to hide their mistake. Every single page. Ironic for a club that claims to be running on the value of transparency.

You can’t tamper with a legal document or file a false document — and there were several lawyers in addition to Mr. Kaminski on their slate who should have known better, assuming they were told. Those who engaged in this deception by altering every one of those petition pages — and that appears to be Unity Club leadership — demonstrated incompetence and a willful disregard of simple rules.

Instead of owning up to the scandal of their own making by apologizing to their signatories, Mr. Kaminski played the victim card by blaming the Benjamin Franklin Reform Democratic Club for raising an objection. To my knowledge, never once in our club’s history has there been an allegation that we submitted modified or falsified petitions.

We understand the importance of the law, and believe the rules should be followed.

Michael Heller

The author is a former president of the Benjamin Franklin Reform Democratic Club