By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma The clouds parted just in time for Antonio Yarbough to enjoy a piece of cheesecake on a Manhattan rooftop last Thursday. He was celebrating five years since he walked out of a Brooklyn courtroom a free man. But he still does not know who killed his family. Friends, relatives, reporters, and not-a-few …
Civil Rights Advocacy
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 …
Court Rules NYPD Can’t Hide Body-Worn Camera Footage Behind § 50-a Law
By Joseph Nielsen Police in New York have been fighting to block the release of raw, unedited body-worn camera footage by claiming that the footage is a “personnel record” used for performance evaluations and therefore confidential under the Civil Rights Law. However, in a decision released last month, the First Department Appellate Division rejected this …
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 …
Michael Cohen and Plea Agreements
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma When Michael Cohen signed his plea agreement last Tuesday at the Southern District of New York, he was affixing his signature to one of the most important documents in recent memory: a sworn admission that he conspired with the president of the United States to violate a federal law to get him …
Governor Cuomo Signs Prosecutorial Conduct Commission Bill into Law, Sort of
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma Getting out ahead of the difficult problem of prosecutorial misconduct, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo yesterday signed a bill creating a new commission empowered to investigate allegations against prosecutors. But in a Signing Memorandum dated today, Cuomo announced that the legislature had agreed to modify the bill in the next session to …
Federal Judge in a Position to Know Urges Governor to Sign Prosecutorial Oversight Bill
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma In the Daily News yesterday, Judge Frederic Block of the Eastern District of New York — who handled the Jabbar Collins civil suit that ended in a $13 million bill to taxpayers to compensate for police misconduct in Brooklyn — urged Gov. Cuomo to sign the bill creating a commission on prosecutorial …
Test the DNA!
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma Oral argument will be heard tomorrow before the Hon. John L. Michalski in Erie County Supreme Court on one simple question: are Brian Lorenzo and James Pugh entitled to DNA testing? The two men have been in prison for the past quarter century for the stabbing-and-strangling murder of Deborah Meindl, a 33-year-old mother …
Want Cell Site Information? Get a Warrant.
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma Your phone constantly tracks and records its location and transmits the information to your wireless carrier. Most phone companies keep that data — known as “cell site location information” — for up to five years. And until last week, it was pretty much available to the government for the asking. Think for …
Prosecutorial Conduct Commission Inches Towards Enactment
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma On Tuesday, the New York State Assembly passed A. 5285-C, the State Commission on Prosecutorial Conduct bill that passed the Senate in a surprise vote last week. Now it’s up to Gov. Andrew Cuomo to sign it into law. Groups like Human Rights Watch and the New York State Association of Criminal …
A Prosecutorial Misconduct Commission for New York State?
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma Prosecutors in New York state who commit even egregious misconduct are virtually untouchable. In today’s New York Times, Nina Morrison of the Innocence Project chronicles a Suffolk County homicide prosecutor who not only held back exculpatory evidence, but doctored documents to try to actively hide them from the court. After a little …
Appeals Court: Sex Offender’s Failure to Disclose Social Media Account is “not a crime”
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma Under the Sex Offender Registration Act, registered sex offenders must tell New York State about all “internet accounts with internet access providers” and “internet identifiers that such offender uses.” Does that mean you have to disclose your social media accounts? Most police and the the State Division of Criminal Justice Services would …
Some Thoughts on Eric Schneiderman
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma The abrupt resignation of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman Monday night left the legal community scratching its head. How could such a bright star, who consistently used the power of his office to fight for just causes, especially for women, have fallen in such rapid and spectacular fashion? The answer, of …
The Crackdown on Sex Websites
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma Last week, President Trump signed legislation that expands criminal liability for people who own or operate online platforms that “promote or facilitate” not only sex trafficking, but virtually any consensual sex work. The new law, which amends Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (“CDA”), is commonly referred to as the “Allow States …
No More Sex in the City?
By Victoria Medley A new law should close an “egregious loophole” that had allowed police officers who sexually assault prisoners to defend themselves by claiming their prisoner consented to the sexual activity. That’s the last thing an 18-year-old woman using the pseudonym Anna Chambers expected to hear when she filed rape charges against two New York …
ZMOLAW Adds Attorney Victoria Medley
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma New York City criminal defense and civil rights lawyer Victoria N. Medley, Esq. has joined the ZMO Law PLLC as an associate, expanding our reach, capacity and expertise in New York’s state and federal courts. Ms. Medley comes to us from the firm of Perlmutter & McGuinness, P.C., which recently dissolved when …
Sex Offender Registration and Drugs
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma Under the regulations implementing New York’s Sex Offender registration act, a person who “has a history of drug or alcohol abuse” is considered at higher risk for re-offense, and can be assessed with points that lead to a higher risk level. In People v. Weber the defendant was found with bags of marijuana at …