When the Hon. Paul B. Wojtaszek of Erie County Supreme Court vacated our client’s 30-year-old conviction last year, we were confident—maybe overconfident—that was the end of the story. James Pugh had been wrongly convicted of the 1993 murder of a young mother in Tonawanda, New York and served 26 years in prison for the crime …
Prisoners' Rights
Brooklyn MDC? Too awful to sentence you there.
By Anne AyotteZMO Law PLLC Paralegal Specialist An Eastern District of New York judge has joined SDNY Judge Jesse Furman in refusing to send a defendant to the Metropolitan Detention Center because of the abhorrent, violent conditions at New York City’s only jail for people accused of federal crimes. On August 5th, defendant Daniel Colucci …
Who killed Dr. Sheikh?
ZMO Law client Alvin Alston was framed by police for the 1987 murder of a Queens doctor. The same police framed Felipe Rodriguez—leading to 27 years in New York State prison for the wrongful conviction, exoneration, and $23.5 million in settlements. Alvin’s case is now pending in Queens Supreme Court: after a nine-year investigation, Alvin …
How long do I have to be cuffed and shackled to this hospital bed?
In June 2023, ZMO Law client Kiana Burgess was riding the 4 train when she experienced what so many New York women have experienced: a man pushing himself into her physical space. The guy saw there were plenty of open seats, but picked the one next to her anyway, half sitting on her lap in …
Justice Behind Bars: Judge Furman calls out the nightmarish conditions at the Brooklyn MDC
By Emily Furman While most New Yorkers enjoy their Easter and Passover meals this Spring, dozens of MDC Brooklyn detainees endure a different kind of cuisine— dishes tainted by maggots and weevils, according to reports by several Federal Defenders. Despite MDC officials confirming such gross contaminations, inmates continue to be served insect-laden meals. Bug-infested food …
Ten Years of Freedom
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma I woke up this morning to the tenth anniversary of the most important day of my legal career and an even more important day in the life of my treasured client, Antonio Yarbough. On February 6, 2014, Antonio and his co-defendant Sharrif Wilson walked out of Supreme Court in Brooklyn as free …
I am Adnan Syed
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma The protagonist of the legendary Serial podcast that put the scourge of questionable convictions into millions of ears in 2014 was set free yesterday after 24 years in prison. Adnan Syed, 17 at the time, was convicted of stabbing his high school classmate Hae Min Lee in suburban Baltimore and dumping her …
Federal Mandatory Minimum? You can still get compassionate release
By Tess Cohen The Second Circuit recently decided in United States v. Halvon that federal defendants can have their sentence reduced under the compassionate release statute even if the reduction means they are incarcerated for less time than required by mandatory minimum sentences. This is good news for people convicted of serious federal crimes. The …
What Do District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s New Policies Mean for Manhattan?
By Tess Cohen Manhattan has a new district attorney who is introducing change on a scale not seen in decades, but reactions to the changes have been overblown, if not alarmist. DA Bragg’s Day One Memo explains that his policies are based on data proving reflexive incarceration does not make us safer. As the New …
Exonerating James Pugh
A Buffalo judge will take testimony over the next three days at a hearing on whether ZMO Law client James Pugh should be exonerated in the murder of Deborah Meindl in 1993. The case has all the markings of a file noir, or, better, a season of a true crime drama spanning three decades. It …
The Odyssey of James Pugh
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma When Jeff Hetzel and I first spoke to our prospective client in the summer of 2015, it seemed like a lost cause. The case was way up in Buffalo, the client was in Cape Vincent on the Canadian border, and seven witnesses had testified that James Pugh, our client, and Scott Lorenzo, …
Justice for Tracy McCarter
By Tess Cohen & Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma ZMO Law attorneys Tess Cohen and Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma were recently drafted to join the defense team of Tracy McCarter, a nurse charged by the New York County District Attorney with murdering her estranged spouse during a terrifying physical altercation. Full details of Tracy’s story can be found in this …
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 …
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 …
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 …
“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 …
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, …