BY ZACHARY MARGULIS-OHNUMA One thing every single one of my clients has in common is that they all have a mother. That’s one of the many responses I give when asked the iconic question, how can you defend criminals when you know they are guilty? In many of our cases, moms play an outsized role. …
Civil Rights Advocacy
Derek Chauvin’s knee is still on your neck
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma America breathed a collective sigh of relief this afternoon when Minneapolis Judge Peter Cahill read out the verdict and ordered Derek Chauvin taken away in handcuffs. One bad cop is off the streets. The Rev. Al Sharpton—an important African-American leader seen long seen in New York as divisive, but now recognized as …
Was George Floyd murdered over a counterfeit $20 bill?
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma Yesterday’s testimony in the George Floyd trial brought home Irish poet Brendan Behan’s remark: “I have never seen a situation so dismal that a policeman couldn’t make it worse.” Trial witness Chris Martin, the 19-year-old clerk working the cash register at Cup Foods convenience store, was in a bind. He had just …
The end of police propaganda? New NYPD crime statistics show the sky is not falling
Guest Post by Adam Elewa, Esq. New York implemented historic and significant criminal justice reform in 2020, including a bail reform bill that led to a “substantial reduction in jail incarceration,” a discovery reform bill that replaced one the most restrictive discovery laws in the nation (what used to be known as the “blindfold law”), …
Sex, Race, and Violence in Atlanta
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma Just before 5 p.m. on Tuesday afternoon, Robert Aaron Long walked into Young’s Asian Massage, thirty miles northwest of Atlanta. He was carrying a nine millimeter handgun he had bought legally earlier that day. He opened fire, gunning down three women and a man. Less than an hour later, four more people …
When getting arrested is a death sentence
By Tess Cohen Three unnamed men died of COVID-19 on Rikers Island in March of 2020, according to a heavily redacted draft report from the Board of Correction, a watchdog for New York jails and prisons. As heartbreaking as it is unsurprising, the report details an utter failure to create space for social distancing, provide …
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 …
Did cops plant a toy gun after killing Miguel Richards?
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma ZMO Law PLLC and the Law Offices of Daniel A. McGuinness PC represent the family of Miguel Richards, a 31-year-old Bronx man who was shot and killed in his own bedroom by New York City Police Department patrol officers in 2017. A few things about the case are undisputed — and appalling. …
Welcome 2021
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma As the calendar turned and the weather cooled, the plan was to say goodbye to the awful year 2020 with the happy announcements that former Manhattan ADA Tess Cohen had joined our team as of counsel to the firm, we had changed our business name to ZMO Law PLLC (after 15 years …
DNA, Racism, and the Assault on Democracy
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma Some points from my experience defending violent crime and debunking police lies can help understand what happened in Washington yesterday without falling back on hollow judgments about how awful other people are. First, as the climate scientist Jim Lovelock told me when I was ten years old, tribal warfare is in our …
The culture of sexual abuse in New York prisons
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma The Law of Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma and Law Offices of Daniel McGuinness filed an Amended Complaint in federal court today detailing harrowing allegations of severe, pervasive, routine, and tolerated sexual abuse by prison guards against six women. According to the allegations in the complaint, women have been raped by guards all over the state — from Lakeview …
Gov. Andrew Cuomo announces executive clemency for ZMOLAW client
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma We are pleased to announce that the governor of New York has granted a sentence commutation to our client, Teara Fatico, reducing her sentence in connection with a 2011 burglary by two years. She will be eligible for release on parole in January 2021. Ms. Fatico had cooperated with the Niagara County …
A New Tool in Our Fight against Police Misconduct
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma Amid calls to abolish the police — which would likely make most of us safer in most situations — the New York State legislature has enacted a welcome reform: on Friday, the measure to repeal Civil Rights Law 50-a was signed into law. That means cowardly cops can no longer hide behind …
ZMOLAW Client: Time to Repeal the Law Bad Police Hide Under
For Immediate Release New York, NY June 3, 2020 – Miguel Richards was shot and killed by New York City police wearing body cameras on September 6, 2017. But the NYPD edited the video footage to mislead the public about what really happened, according to lawyers for the Richards family. Now Richards’s parents are calling …
Why Derek Chauvin thought he could get away with murder
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma Every decent human being in America who saw the expression on Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin’s face as he caused the death of George Floyd recoiled in horror. The Hennepin County District Attorney’s Office-at least so far-has not concluded that Chauvin intended to kill Floyd, just that he acted with a “depraved …
ZMOLAW adds attorney Ben Notterman
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma We are delighted to announce that Benjamin Notterman has joined the ZMO Law PLLC as an associate attorney. Mr. Notterman comes to us from the New York University Center on the Administration of Criminal Law, where he was a research fellow investigating executive clemency under the direction of Prof. Rachel Barkow. As …
“Release as many vulnerable people as possible”
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma New York City is home to it’s own archipelago of three federal jails, three borough jails, eight functioning jails on Rikers Island, two locked prison wards, and lockup facilities in each of seven state and federal criminal courthouses in the five boroughs. The best estimate is that there are upwards of 10,000 …
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 …
Why clemency is good
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma Have a look at David Leonhardt’s recent NY Times newsletter, which posits that executive clemency is a critical component of our current criminal justice system. The newsletter came in the wake of scathing criticism of Pres. Trump’s use of clemency to help his political friends. Approximately two million Americans are behind bars, …
Freeing Felipe Rodriguez
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma Thirteen years ago Nina Morrison, a staff attorney at the Innocence Project – the organization, founded by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, that spawned the movement to use DNA to free the innocent in the United States – came across the case of Felipe Rodriguez. Felipe was a Brooklyn construction worker and …
“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 …