By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma
As the school year and the fiscal year and the biblical year all get underway, ZMO Law is settling into its new routine. We announced earlier this month that Tess Cohen is now a partner at the firm with increased responsibility for expanding our services to clients.
We are also glowing from some late summer successes:
- Felipe Rodriguez’s civil rights case against two former Long Island Railroad detectives settled with the Metropolitan Transit Authority for the cost of three or four subway cars. It had been scheduled for trial in March 2024. Felipe’s total recovery, from the State of New York, the City of New York, and the MTA, came to $23.5 million. He’d rather have back the 27 best years of his life he spent in prison wrongly accused of murder, but we were proud to help him obtain just compensation. Before two of the three settlements, Felipe’s case was featured in a front-page New York Times story about lenders who fund exonerees suing for compensation. I’ll miss speaking to Felipe every day and the chance to present the case to a federal jury.
- Erie County Judge Paul B. Wojtaszek cleared the name of our client James Pugh, vacating his conviction for the brutal 1993 homicide of a young mother in Tonawanda, just outside Buffalo. We had been working on Jimmy’s case since 2015, when he was still in prison. He was granted parole in 2019, even though he steadfastly maintained his innocence, as he had since the day he was arrested. Jimmy has been working hard, complying with parole, and staying out of trouble ever since. The Erie County district attorney is appealing the careful and thoughtful decision of Judge Wojtaszek, which turned on the DA withholding exculpatory evidence and DNA that excluded both Jimmy and his co-defendant, Scott Lorenz, from the murder weapons.
- ZMO Law was engaged to represent General Hugo “El Pollo” Carvajal, the former chief of military intelligence for Venezuela under Pres. Hugo Chavez. General Carvajal is accused of narco-terrorism by engaging in drug trafficking in conjunction with the FARC Colombian rebel group—the Drug Enforcement Administration’s perennial stalking horse used to cook up DEA-imagined drug trafficking schemes and tie them to “terrorism” with the effect of justifying astronomical budgets that serve no actual crime-reduction purpose. But no hard evidence even suggesting our client was involved in drug trafficking has been made public. ZMO Law is uniquely suited for this assignment: with a bilingual staff, Tess Cohen’s expertise as a former narcotics prosecutor, a track record of fighting DEA terrorism cases, and long experience in the Southern District of New York, we look forward to clearing General Carvajal’s name at trial.
At the same time, we maintain our busy docket of indigent defense cases in federal court, representing people in the Eastern and Southern Districts of New York accused of drug trafficking, gang violence, fraud and sex crimes. We continue to advocate for victims of civil rights violations, including a number of women sexually assaulted by guards in New York State prisons. We fight for both victims of sex crimes to get compensation, and for people accused of sex crimes to be treated fairly and humanely.
With technology invading every corner of our lives and the information environment growing ever more polarized, we feel the need for zealous advocacy for the accused and the aggrieved as strongly as ever. I am grateful to our colleagues at the defense bar, our allies in social services and on the bench, and especially our clients and their families who put their trust in us to vindicate their rights and allow them to live normal productive lives.