A Yonkers man accused of threatening the judge in his criminal and matrimonial cases was denied bail after a prosecutor said he had refused to surrender all of the guns he owns.
But the Westchester District Attorney’s Office said the next day that they had been mistaken and Nicholas Leo had turned in his guns.
Leo, who is also a lawyer, appeared at a bail hearing Monday, June 16, following a weekend in jail after his arrest for allegedly sending acting state Supreme Court Justice Susan Capeci more than four dozen troublesome emails over the previous month.
He allegedly threatened to beat Capeci and expressed hope she would die in a car fire after he lost custody of his children.
Leo, 57, is charged with aggravated harassment of a judge, a felony punishable by up to four years in state prison. He was before Capeci in the Integrated Domestic Violence court after a pair of arrests on criminal contempt charges accusing him of violating court orders in his child custody case.
His lawyer, David Ortiz, urged state Supreme Court Justice James McCarty to set some bail, saying Leo was a lifelong Yonkers resident with no criminal convictions, with a law practice and businesses in the city. He said Leo had appeared at all his prior court hearings and was not a flight risk.
He said Leo would be best served by remaining free to continue mental health treatment.
“He is a man who has been going through a lot of turmoil in his life,” Ortiz told the judge.
ADA describes Nicholas Leo’s emails to judge as ‘threatening’
But Assistant District Attorney John Thomas asked that Leo remain at the county jail, suggesting he posed a safety risk and had the means to flee.
Thomas said there were 53 emails from Leo to Capeci between May 13 and June 11, many which were “vulgar, abusive and most significantly threatening.” In one, he said, Leo told Capeci “burn your robe because you’re not going to need it in hell where you’re going.”
The prosecutor said the emails were “beyond troubling and a clear deterioration of the defendant’s mental state” and that Leo’s “escalation of behavior” suggested whatever treatment he was undergoing was not working. Thomas urged the judge to also order Leo held to undergo a psychiatric examination.
Thomas said that another judge had revoked Leo’s gun license and ordered him to turn over 21 guns listed on his license, but that Leo had only surrendered 15 of them. On Tuesday morning, June 17, a DA spokesman said prosecutors had reviewed the issue further and determined all the guns were surrendered.
McCarty said ordering a psychiatric evaluation would be up to the White Plains judge handling the aggravated harassment charge. But he expressed concern about the remaining guns and ordered Leo back to the county jail without bail.
Ortiz did not have a chance to address the matter of the six guns and declined to comment after the hearing.
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Yonkers lawyer accused of threatening judge denied bail
Reporting by Jonathan Bandler, Rockland/Westchester Journal News / Rockland/Westchester Journal News
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