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. …
What's New
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 …
Principal Attorney Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma to Present on “Sex Offense Laws 101”
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma Tune in to a webinar on December 3 for an overview of New York’s sex offense laws and the harsh consequences of a sex offense conviction. The program, organized by the New York City Bar Association SORA Working Group and Committee on Criminal Justice Operations, will provide a broad overview of the …
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 …
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 …
Meet Our New Director of Marketing
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma The ZMO Law PLLC is pleased to announce that Teresa McNamara has joined our office as the new Director of Marketing. Teresa, an accomplished actor, will work with us while still pursuing her acting career. Her experience in social media and writing, combined with a creative mindset, will help increase our presence …
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 Whistleblower Complaint and the Transcript: A Criminal Trial Lawyer’s Perspective
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma The past week was one of extraordinary revelations relating to foreign policy and corruption at the top of the government of the United States. The public got to see two documents, just months after they were created: first, the “TELCON” or transcript of a phone call between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian …
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 …
Celebrating Five Years of Freedom
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 …
Is there illegal child pornography on YouTube?
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma An article in today’s New York Times suggests that there is an “open gate for pedophiles” on YouTube because of the way the video hosting service suggests videos to users. If you look at one video of a partially clothed child on YouTube, the service’s algorithm will send you to more and …
District court lowers sentence from 225 to 200 months after appeal. Still too long, appeals court says.
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma A 200-month sentence imposed on a first-time child pornography offender was thrown out by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday because the judge erroneously assumed that the defendant must have committed a prior sex offense. The reversal was the second time that the circuit court vacated the sentence imposed on …
Busted in NY? Three Ways it Will Be Easier to Win Your Case
By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma This year’s New York State budget passed earlier this month with the most sweeping criminal justice reforms in at least a generation. The changes go into effect in 2020 and will change almost everything about defending people in New York State cases, where the vast majority of arrests in New York are …