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's New
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 …
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 …
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 …
A New Way to Avoid Mandatory Minimum Sentences
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma Federal criminal cases in court are driven by mandatory minimum sentences. Drugs, guns, child pornography and sex trafficking (among others) all carry mandatory minimum sentences which used to mean that, if the government has the evidence and won’t let you plead to a lesser crime, you do the time. That just might have changed …
Is a newspaper a newspaper if it does not have a newsroom?
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma A year or so working as a reporter at 220 E. 42nd Street around 1993 completely changed my life. It was part of nearly four years I spent on the staff at the Daily News, once one of the largest-circulation publications in the world but already in the midst of a long, …
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 …