By Julia LaicoZMO Law PLLC Law Clerk Travelers expect to have their luggage screened at the airport—but few anticipate that officers can comb through their phones, laptops, or digital devices, let alone that they can face criminal charges for something found on their electronics. But that’s what happened to Kurbonali Sultanov, whose case raises critical …
Child Pornography
What do you mean they searched my house? Warrants, receipts and affidavits explained
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma If it could happen to defeated former president Donald Trump it could happen to anyone: the feds swooped in and searched his house last week—all 58 bedrooms and 33 bathrooms were up for grabs. Go big or go home. There was a lawyer there but the resident was out-of-town. FBI agents left …
What the Sentences for Child Pornography Are Supposed To Be
We heard a lot in the last week about judges who sentence people to too little prison time for child pornography. In case it was not obvious coming from foamy-mouthed demagogues in what was once the world’s greatest deliberative body, it was all hogwash. Child pornography sentences are off-the-charts too high in almost every case. …
Recidivism and Federal Sentencing
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma Many of the outrageously high sentences doled out in federal court are driven by fear — fear that a person convicted of a crime once will go on to commit another crime once he or she is freed back into the community. That’s called recidivism. Judges care about it and the U.S. …
New York’s sex offender registration system is broken. The time has come to fix it.
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma There are more than 42,000 people in New York who have to register as sex offenders — about the population of Poughkeepsie. Sex offender registration can affect every aspect of a person’s life: where he lives, where he can travel, how he is treated by his neighbors, the community and even the …
Criminal Defense in the Time of Coronavirus
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma I often say that our clients come to us on the worst day of their lives, the day they are arrested, or learned that a loved one was arrested and may be separated from them for a very long time. As the world faces a health crisis whose proportions remain unknown, the …
Should People Accused of Sex Offenses Be Banned from Public Transit?
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma Not that anyone would want to ride the subways right now, but the New York City Bar Association has come out in strong opposition to a proposal that would permit the MTA to ban people from trains and buses in New York based on little more than accusations relating to sex offenses. The …
“I will be absolutely, completely free”
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma “Motion Granted.” With those words, the Hon. Joseph Zayas of Queens Supreme Court vacated the murder conviction and dismissed the indictment against Felipe Rodriguez. It was a triumphant end to a fight that has consumed our office since 2015 and the Innocence Project since 2007. In all those years, Mr. Rodriguez was …
There were 912,643 people on the U.S. Sex Offender Registry last year. Now? Nobody knows.
Guest column by William Dobbs, Esq. from The Dobbs Wire. Is the sex offense registry growing or shrinking? Hard to tell because the long-time keeper of the national statistics, National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), has stopped updating the figures. Every six months for many years NCMEC put a new 50 state map online …
The judge gave the FBI a warrant to break into computers in Virginia. They used it in New York. Good faith?
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma Twelve federal appeals courts have said that the FBI acted in good faith when they used a Virginia warrant to search thousands of computers around the world in the controversial Playpen child pornography case. Our office last week asked for a special hearing in the Second Circuit to challenge that conclusion, with …
In Maryland, you can be prosecuted for exploiting…yourself
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma In the latest perversion of the laws against child pornography, Maryland’s highest court late last month upheld the conviction of a teenage girl for sending around a one-minute video of herself performing fellatio. The recipient of the fellatio was not prosecuted. Neither were the girl’s erstwhile friends who, after a falling out, …
Who Killed Jeffrey Epstein?
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma Defense attorneys were turned away from the high rise federal jail in lower Manhattan known as the Metropolitan Correction Center on Saturday morning. The Legal Department told us, it was “due to an earlier security issue.” Apparently, they were scouring the jail to find Jeffrey Epstein’s killer. Epstein was found dead by …
Is there illegal child pornography on YouTube?
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma An article in today’s New York Times suggests that there is an “open gate for pedophiles” on YouTube because of the way the video hosting service suggests videos to users. If you look at one video of a partially clothed child on YouTube, the service’s algorithm will send you to more and …
District court lowers sentence from 225 to 200 months after appeal. Still too long, appeals court says.
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma A 200-month sentence imposed on a first-time child pornography offender was thrown out by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday because the judge erroneously assumed that the defendant must have committed a prior sex offense. The reversal was the second time that the circuit court vacated the sentence imposed on …
Busted in NY? Three Ways it Will Be Easier to Win Your Case
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma This year’s New York State budget passed earlier this month with the most sweeping criminal justice reforms in at least a generation. The changes go into effect in 2020 and will change almost everything about defending people in New York State cases, where the vast majority of arrests in New York are …
Conviction Overturned for Client Accused of Importing over 100 Kilos of Heroin
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma Judge Raymond Dearie of the Eastern District of New York ruled yesterday that ZMOLAW client Adamou Djibo is entitled to a new trial because the government wrongfully withheld thousands of pages of relevant information from a cooperating witness’s cell phone. The reversal follows a remand from the Second Circuit: the appeals court …
Can Border Agents Search Your Cell Phone?
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma Imagine you are met on the tarmac getting off a plane at JFK Terminal Two by armed customs officers. They tell you to come with them. They drive you to a secure area in Terminal Four, where foreigners are “processed” — i.e detained until they are admitted into the U.S. or sent …
SDNY Says Prison Brass Can be Sued for Sex Abuse of Inmate
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma Top New York State officials claimed that they cannot be sued for the sex abuse, cover-up, and retaliation against Yekatrina Pusepa, a female inmate at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, at the hands of a prison guard. Last week, a federal judge said they were wrong. In October 2017, our office, partnering with …
Countdown: Child Sex Abuse Survivors Have Less Than a Year to Sue for Damages
By Victoria Medley Senate Bill S2440, the New York Child Victims Act, was signed into law by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Thursday. The new law, which has been a goal of victims’ rights advocates for years, extends the statute of limitations for child sex abuse victims to file civil lawsuits, reviving old claims that, …
Big Changes to Deadlines in Child Sex Abuse Cases
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma On Monday, the New York Legislature passed a series of reforms that will significantly impact civil lawsuits and criminal prosecutions for sexual abuse of children. Senate Bill S2440, or the Child Victims Act, extends the statutes of limitations to allow victims who are abused before age 18 more time to file lawsuits — …
Mandatory Minimum Sentences and Federal Child Pornography Charges
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma The U.S. Sentencing Commission kicked off the new year with a comprehensive report analyzing data from federal sex offense cases. The report, which runs 81 pages plus a 62-page appendix of charts and graphs, contains some eye-opening conclusions. The most significant for child pornography cases is this: even though there is “little …
The Federal Criminal Justice Reform that Wasn’t
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma As of December 27, there were 180,429 prisoners in federal custody. Think about that for a minute — about a fifth of the population of San Francisco is behind bars for interstate crimes. No one seriously thinks this many people should be housed, clothed, fed, and secured with federal tax dollars. (More …
Spending Thanksgiving at Home
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma Our office had two happy results in cases in the last twenty-four hours, just in time for the Thanksgiving holiday. I won’t use names to protect client confidentiality, but here is the short version of how two men will pass a more peaceful Thanksgiving than they have in a long time. Our …
A Holistic Defense Leads to Less Time Locked Up
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma People who seek out criminal lawyers are human beings, in all their vast complexity. An important part of our jobs as lawyers is to reveal the full person to the court: their prior conduct, the quality of their relationships, their health and addiction issues, and their prospects for the future. If a …
Freedom…to Marry
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma With a heart full of joy, I had the unique pleasure of attending the wedding of Felipe and Karen Rodriguez last month. Felipe has been my client since the summer of 2015, when I signed up to assist the Innocence Project in representing him in his claim that he was wrongfully convicted …
Margulis-Ohnuma Client Antonio Yarbough Received Highest Payout for NYPD Abuse in Last Five Years
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma According to an article in the New York Post that was picked up in Newsweek, the City of New York has paid out $384 million in settlements for police abuse cases filed in the last five years. The recipient of the largest slice of that pie? Antonio Yarbough, our client since 2008 …