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July 1, 2009: Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma and Adam Perlmutter win $1 million civil rights verdict.  On Monday, an eight-person jury in Manhattan federal court found that a prison guard at Rikers Island violated the constitutional rights of Stevie B. Tatum, an innocent inmate, by being deliberately indifferent to his safety when other inmates brutally attacked him.  Mr. Tatum was beaten at the Adolescent Reception and Detention Center on Rikers Island in 2005 just hours before being acquitted of the DWI charge that he had been arrested for.  The evidence showed that the defendant, a correction officer, stood by while the inmates broke his jaw in two places and shattered the bones in his nose in two separate beatings over a period of a few minutes on April 29, 2005.  The officer admitted swearing at Mr. Tatum in front of other inmates.  According to the trial testimony, she charged at him and was held back by some inmates while other inmates beat him.

The jury held the officer liable for Mr. Tatum's injuries and awarded $1 million in damages to compensate him.  Exhibits admitted into evidence at trial showed that City employees tried to cover up the incident by filing a large number of false documents, including a phony "statement" bearing a forged signature of the plaintiff.  The City of New York declined to call as a witness a supervisor who signed many of the apparently forged documents, despite purporting to represent him and insisting there was no conflict between him and the correction officer.  The jury heard testimony from a medical expert, Dr. Richard Sullivan, who explained the numerous medical procedures required to repair the bones in Mr. Tatum's face.  One of the inmates accused was represented by Rishi Bandhari, Esq. and found not to be liable.  The Hon. Paul G. Gardephe of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York presided over the weeklong trial.  We'd like to thank Adam Perlmutter, Esq., Alisa Randell, Danielle Smith, Martha Lineberger and especially Stevie B. Tatum for their extraordinary work and their dedication to upholding the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution.

June 24, 2009: Margulis-Ohnuma obtains reversal of sex abuse case.  The Second Department Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court corrected an appalling conviction last week when it reversed People v. Montoya, a case of alleged sex abuse by a neighborhood handyman in Brooklyn. The appeals court found a number of errors at trial -- the defendant was not properly warned about how he would be cross examined, the defense lawyer was not allowed to cross examine or call witnesses on key points, and confusing, prejudicial testimony was left uncorrected on the record, just to name a few.  One of the counts of conviction simply had no evidence at all to support it.  The case illustrates how easy it is for authorities to obtain a false conviction when emotions run high in a trial -- and, more than two years after the trial, how hard it is to undo a wrongful conviction even where the trial was grossly unfair.

June 11, 2009: Attorney Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma helps train budding lawyers in the art and science of trial advocacy.  Mr. Margulis-Ohnuma joined a group of criminal practitioners from the New York City Bar Association's Committee on Criminal Advocacy for two mock trials at the Acorn High School for Social Justice in Brooklyn.  The group taught ninth- and tenth-graders how to try the make-believe case of People v. Kramer, a mugging on a dark, rainy street.  Cast against type, Mr. Margulis-Ohnuma worked with the prosecution "lawyers" and witnesses, who did a fabulous job with opening statements, closing arguments and, especially, withering cross-examinations.  Many thanks to SEC attorney Lara Mehraban and the other great attorneys who volunteered their time, as well as the kids whose passion for the law made us all want to come back year after year.

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May 19, 2009: New York High Court Rules GPS Requires a Warrant.  In People v. Weaver, the New York Court of Appeals held last week that the placement of a GPS tracking device on the undercarriage of a car is so intrusive as to constitute a search "of constitutional dimension and consequences."  Except in narrow, well-defined circumstances, searches require warrants in the United States.  As a result, a conviction based on the warrantless placement of a tracking device was overturned.

Quoting the mighty Justice Jackson, the Nuremburg prosecutor and liberal Supreme Court Justice who in 1947 was already far ahead of his time, Judge Lippman wrote for the majority: "GPS is not a mere enhancement of human sensory capacity, it facilitates a new technological perception of the world in which the situation of any object may be followed and exhaustively recorded over, in most cases, a practically unlimited period.... That such a surrogate technological deployment is not — particularly when placed at the unsupervised discretion of agents of the state 'engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime'  — compatible with any reasonable notion of personal privacy or ordered liberty would appear to us obvious."

The Court also gave a nod to the "New Federalism," pointing out that the issue of whether GPS placement is a search is unsettled in the federal courts.  As a result, the decision was based on the New York State Constititution alone.  As a result, the Court explained, if the United States Supreme Court does not ultimately adopt the rule set forth in Weaver, the State Constitution would provide a broader protection and still bar the warrantless placement of a GPS on a car.  Click People v. Weaver to read the whole case.

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