On a snowy morning in Buffalo almost thirty-three years after the vicious murder of a young mother in her home, the Erie County Supreme Court last week dismissed all charges against ZMO Law client James Pugh.
James had served twenty-six-and-a-half years wrongfully incarcerated for the crime. He is now fully exonerated.
James, a 63-year-old contractor, was convicted in 1994 based on false testimony that was coerced by police from the City of Tonawanda. He was released on parole in 2019 after hiring ZMO Law four years earlier.
The victim, Deborah Meindl, was stabbed and strangled in her home on February 17, 1993. All signs point to the fact that the murder was premeditated. Eyewitnesses saw that the killer remained in the home for several hours before the murder. The family dog was found trapped in the cellar. An anonymous caller reached out to Ms. Meindl at the hospital where she was a nursing student to warn her hours before the murder. After she was killed, her husband was recorded discussing hiring a hit man to kill her. He had recently taken out a life insurance policy.
But Erie County prosecutors and Tonawanda police nonetheless pressed the false theory that James and a co-defendant, Scott Lorenz, killed Ms. Meindl in a burglary gone awry. Neither James nor Scott had any connection to Ms. Meindl or her family. The house was a run-down single-family home across from a gas station, an unlikely burglary target. The witnesses against James and Scott in the 1994 trial consisted of their friends and associates who were threatened, coerced, and pressured by detectives and prosecutors into giving false testimony. Much of the coercion was recorded on tape.
In 2017, following a two-year investigation, ZMO Law and Scott’s attorneys, led by Ilann Maazel of Emery Celli, filed a motion seeking DNA testing of items found at the crime scene, including a necktie used to strangle Ms. Meindl and a knife used to stab her. The DNA results came in over the next year and they were stunning: many of the items recovered from the crime scene had mixture DNA on them consisting of genetic material from Ms. Meindl and an unknown male. The mixtures were tested against DNA newly-swabbed from the cheeks of Scott and James.
Both Scott and James were categorically excluded as contributors to the mixtures. In other words, a man other than Scott or James had deposited his DNA on the tie wrapped around the victim’s neck and on the bloody knife used to repeatedly stab her.
Years of litigation ensued. In the summer of 2021, two Erie County prosecutors assigned to re-investigate the case concluded that Mr. Lorenz and Mr. Puigh were probably innocence and that some evidence pointed to a celebrity criminal, Richard Matt, who had escaped from Clinton Correctional Facility and was on the run for a month before he was shot and killed by law enforcement in the Adirondacks. Matt lived close to the murder victim and, shockingly, had maintained a close relationship with the lead City of Tonawanda detective who had developed the false case against Scott and James.
When the two prosecutors presented their findings to the office’s executives, they were criticized and demoted. Nonetheless, the court ordered an evidentiary hearing which played out over about ten days in late 2021 and 2022. It became clear at the hearing that exculpatory evidence was held back at the original trial, the detective pressured witnesses into giving false testimony, and the DNA and other circumstantial evidence pointed to an unknown third party culprit.
On August 23, 2023, Justice Paul B. Wojtaszek of Erie County Supreme Court vacated both convictions.
The prosecutor’s office fought the vacatur tooth and nail, appealing it up to New York’s highest court. Their arguments were shot down at every turn. By the end of 2024, they had no other option but to re-try both defendants or drop the case.
The first re-trial, of Scott Lorenz, ended with a hung jury in October. James’s trial was scheduled for December 2. In a desperate last-ditch effort to save face, the prosecutors filed a motion to renew and reargue Judge Wojtaszek’s decision vacating the 1994 conviction. That was shot down too. We filed a “Clayton Motion” asking the judge to dismiss the case because the People had no evidence to proceed to trial. The prosecutors never even responded and the judge reserved decision.
James’s trial was scheduled to begin last Tuesday, December 2. A jury was standing by. Our defense team was ready for battle armed with exculpatory DNA, tapes that would have crushed every one of the People’s witnesses, and extensive evidence of police misconduct at every turn in the investigation.
But just before the close of business, the People finally saw the light. They filed their own motion to dismiss which Judge Wojtaszek granted the following day. James Pugh was exonerated.
Last week’s proceedings marked the end of a nightmare for James, and a new chapter for the Meindl family, whose only survivor is Deborah’s daughter, Lisa Meindl Payne. Lisa was just seven at the time of the murder. Her ten-year-old sister Jessica discovered the body when she came home from school that cold day in 1993. Jessica passed away in 2020.
Lisa Meindl supported dismissing the case against Mr. Pugh. “I am asking the court to grant the motion to dismiss with prejudice thus ensuring that James Pugh may live his life free of the fear that months or years from now he will again be on trial,” she said in a prepared statement read in open court. While failing to acknowledge Mr. Pugh’s actual innocence with complete certainty, Lisa recognized the irregularities in the court proceedings that led to his conviction: “I was given justice but due to a procedural error, mishandling of evidence, DNA, fingerprints, unfollowed leads, lies, theories, thrown out confessions, misconduct and corruption, was stripped of that so called justice.”
After the case against him was dismissed, James said: “I’m not satisfied with this. Like Lisa said, there’s no justice here for her or for me. We both just want the truth, and it’s the prosecutors’ job to get it for us. They failed. They failed Lisa. They failed me. They failed Lisa’s sister. Most of all they failed Deborah Meindl.”
The exoneration ends a three-decade odyssey for Jimmy, who never gave up on the American justice system despite all the cruelty it inflicted on him. His wrongful conviction was not an accident: it was the product of deliberate police and prosecutors’ decisions to deny Mr. Pugh and his co-defendant a fair trial, thus covering up for the real killer who may still be at large.
Our office has called on the Erie County District Attorney’s office to continue its investigation based on the DNA and unfollowed leads to try to find the real killers. Despite what the prosecutors presented in court and will probably present in the wrongheaded and incompetent re-re-trial of Scott Lorenz, modern methods applied to the preserved evidence can reveal vast information about who was present when Deborah Meindl was murdered.
James is currently represented by Tess Cohen and me. Paralegal Anne Ayotte is assigned to the case and was instrumental in preparing for the trial that never was. Over the years, attorney Victoria Medley, and paralegals Sophia Lattanzio, Kayla Ryan and Jeffrey Hetzel and others associated with ZMO Law have pressed for James’s exoneration.
Scott Lorenz is scheduled to be tried again in April. He will be represented by Ilann Maazel, Early Ward and Emily Wanger of Emery Celli.