Biography

Scott Kessler is the former Chief of the Domestic Violence Bureau at the Queens County District Attorney’s Office. Under his leadership, the Bureau earned a national reputation for excellence, based on its high conviction rate and its successful prosecution of thousands of domestic violence cases, including many pursued without victim cooperation.

Mr. Kessler worked closely with the NYPD to help develop an early-investigation and case-enhancement system that allowed prosecutors to proceed using evidence-based prosecution. That system included an integrated database of digital photographs of domestic violence victims, digital transmission of 911 recordings, email communication to provide victims with information and orders of protection, 24-hour on-call prosecutors for major domestic violence incidents, and police questionnaires designed to preserve excited utterances made by victims at crime scenes and in hospitals. The United States Department of Justice studied this model and identified the Queens County District Attorney’s Office protocols as a standard for other jurisdictions.

From 1988 to 2018, Mr. Kessler served as an Assistant District Attorney in Queens County, prosecuting a wide range of felony cases from investigation through trial, including murder, robbery, rape, sexual abuse, assault, and other serious crimes. In 2005, he received the Dewey Award for Outstanding Prosecutor from the Association of the Bar of the City of New York.

Mr. Kessler also has a long and distinguished teaching career. He served as an adjunct professor at St. John’s University School of Law from 1996 to 2018, where he taught trial advocacy and trained prosecutors in evidence-based prosecution techniques both nationally and internationally. From 2010 to 2015, he was also an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School, where he taught advanced trial advocacy and supervised an externship. He was named Adjunct Professor of the Year at St. John’s in 2005 and Clinical Professor of the Year in 2006, 2007, and 2008.

He currently serves as a  trial consultant to the Corporation Counsel of Maui County where is works on major cases .