Ex-governor. David Paterson says it’s “really annoying” how New York’s laws have become too lenient for “coddled” juvenile defenders – after he and his stepson were recently attacked by vicious youths on a city street.
‘We overcompensated for what happened to juvenile delinquents’ Paterson said 770 WABC radio Sunday, citing historical abuses of young people in youth detention centers.
“The pendulum has now swung the other way, to the point that the criminal justice system is treating these children who start these fights as if they need to be coddled,” said the former government, who is 70 and legally blind.
“It’s really annoying,” he told John Catsimatidis, host of the “Cats Roundtable.”
Paterson and his stepson, Anthony Sliwa, 20, were beaten by a rowdy gang and two townspeople.
Authority workers while walking the family’s dog on an Upper East Side sidewalk on Oct. 4, authorities and the couple said.
The trouble started when Sliwa, the son of Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, punished a group of youths who climbed a fire escape — and the young brats later returned with city housing workers to confront him and his stepfather.
Paterson said he was stunned when he saw the full surveillance video of the fight, indicating it was worse that he could even remember it.
He suggested he may have temporarily blacked out during the attack.
“When I thought the incident was over, one of the participants apparently punched me by running from my back to the front and hitting me straight on the head. I fell over and was on the ground, and I have no memory of that,” said Paterson, who was governor from 2007 to 2010.
Paterson previously told The Post that he believed the two Housing Authority employees provoked the attack on him and Anthony — and said the video supports his claim.
“They said they had made efforts to try to stabilize the situation. Well, you wouldn’t know it from watching that video,” he said.
The NYPD last week arrested Housing workers Trevor Nurse, 40, and Diamond Minter, 34, and charged them with second-degree assault in the cowardly attack.
Three youths, ages 12 and 13, turned themselves in to police over the attack and were charged with second-degree assault, while a third boy who surrendered was released without charge after police determined he did not participate.
Paterson said during the Post interview last week that prosecutors and the judge should throw the book at the two adults and let them “rot in hell.”
Footage apparently shot through the window of a McDonald’s shows half a dozen assailants kicking and punching a bloodied and defenseless Anthony as he lays on the ground as Paterson tries to pull them away.
Paterson said he was hit by a youth and hit him back.
“I threw it in the window of McDonald’s, [and] I hit him again,” the Democratic police officer said at the time. “The adults escalated the situation. The adults can rot in hell as far as I’m concerned.”
