By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma Many workers in strip clubs are well-paid, hard-working women supporting their families and using the extra income from the club to take control of their lives. Many clubs treat their workers fairly. Many customers are polite and appropriate. But not all. If you have been taken advantage of at a strip club, …
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Tracy McCarter: Free at Last
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma After subjecting her to thirty-three months of living hell, the Supreme Court of the State of New York has finally, finally, finally dismissed the charges against Tracy McCarter, a battered woman whose husband died while he was attacking her. Acting Justice Diane Kiesel’s opinion dismissing the case can only be described as …
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 …
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 …
A kind of justice
By Zach Margulis-Ohnuma She sat in front of me, bald, shellshocked, speechless, drug addled. The government had charged her with moving massive quantities of GBL and meth, gal Friday to a big-time drug dealer working the nightclubs. She was looking at a ten-year mandatory minimum sentence, no bail. The plan was to send her to …
Can the Supreme Court survive the stench?
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma Two unprecedented things happened in the legal world this week. First, someone at the Supreme Court—in an unheard of breach of protocol—leaked the draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health out to the public. Second, the substance of Dobbs draft indicated that for the first time ever, the Supreme Court is …
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. …
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 …
Can I use the internet if I am convicted of a sex offense?
By Benjamin Notterman For decades, parole officers have imposed restrictions on how people convicted of sex offenses can use the internet. Some of these restrictions made sense; others were just blanket prohibitions that became more and more onerous as the internet and social media became more enmeshed in everyday life. Last month, a federal court …
No Mayor Adams, Rolling Back Reforms is Not the Answer to Gun Violence
By Tess Cohen A series of tragedies dominated the news cycle over the last few weeks, including horrific incidents of gun violence. In the Bronx, a baby was shot by a stray bullet. In Harlem, NYPD Officers Wilbert Mora and Jason Rivera were shot and killed while responding to a domestic disturbance. Although homicides began …
Reforming Laws Affecting People Convicted of Sex Offenses
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma There is a quiet struggle in New York State to ease the irrational burdens on people convicted of sex offenses. While the political winds mostly blow in the direction of more and more restrictions, policymakers are coming to realize that making life miserable for people does not actually improve public safety. As …
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 …
When is a Doctor Actually a Drug Dealer?
By Tess Cohen The Supreme Court is hearing several cases that seek to help answer the question: when is a doctor who writes prescriptions for controlled substances selling a prescription, and therefore not practicing medicine but committing a crime. This is one of the more difficult questions the criminal law asks its jurors to answer, …
Is the Kenosha verdict a tragedy?
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma The second major Black Lives Matter verdict is in, and it was an acquittal. After the first verdict, the murder conviction of Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin for intentionally asphyxiating George Floyd, the Rev. Al Sharpton said “we don’t celebrate a man going to jail, we would rather George be alive.” Many …
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, …
The Dangers of False Rhetoric Around Bail Reform
By Tess Cohen CBS New York recently reported that New York City Police Commissioner Dermot Shea struggled to back up his repeated claims that the 2019 bail reform law is the reason that gun violence increased in New York City during 2020. This criticism comes as no surprise given that Shea’s claims were directly contradicted …
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. …
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 …
Some thoughts on Mother’s Day from a criminal defense lawyer
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. …
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 …