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The judge gave the FBI a warrant to break into computers in Virginia. They used it in New York. Good faith?

September 13, 2019 | 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 a series of simple arguments that, somehow, the appeals courts keep missing – including a Second Circuit panel that ruled on the warrant last month.

Click here for a redacted version of our appellate brief and here for our Petition for Initial Hearing En Banc, an unusual request effectively required by the Second Circuit’s August ruling.

The logic is simple and the stakes are high.

In Maryland, you can be prosecuted for exploiting…yourself

September 9, 2019 | 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, may have distributed the video (the court, in a lengthy decision, pointed out that the video was originally distributed in a super-private group chat with two friends, only one of whom later became hostile to the girl in the video).

Who Killed Jeffrey Epstein?

August 12, 2019 | 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 hanging. He had been taken off suicide watch less than two weeks earlier. Suicide watch is a special unit where each prisoner is observed 24/7 by another prisoner who has special training. Epstein had been placed on suicide watch after he was found unconscious with neck injuries on July 23. Seems the prison hierarchy thought six days was enough even for a man whose rich, hedonistic, rapacious lifestyle had come to a crashing end. From there, they put him in the “SHU” — the notorious special housing unit, typically reserved for the most violent inmates. Then, they took away his roommate. Then, guards stopped checking in on his cell every thirty minutes like they are supposed to.

He was found dead at 6:30 a.m., according to the New York Times.

Celebrating Five Years of Freedom

June 23, 2019 | 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.

IMG_3241-225x300 EVWSG4FLI66A4VDF6ZCFQUHW2M-200x300 Friends, relatives, reporters, and not-a-few lawyers gathered to honor Tony and help him celebrate his exoneration, just as we celebrated on a Manhattan rooftop in June 2014. Tony’s wrongful conviction for the slaughter of his family — which was actually committed by an unknown man who raped and murdered a fourth person seven years later — was one of the most appalling episodes of the reign of Charles Hynes as Brooklyn District Attorney. Hynes was defeated by Ken Thompson in 2013. Thompson agreed Antonio should be released after just five weeks on the job.

Antonio has spent the last five years recovering from what the state did to him. He has reconnected with his extended family and old friends. He has made new friends. He has worked at a hotel. He now donates his time to the Alliance of Families for Justice, where he sits on the board (alongside actor Danny Glover) and provides support for families affected by the criminal justice system. Antonio has touched countless lives with his quiet grace and heroic resilience. As he said on Piers Morgan the day after his release, he has no time for bitterness.

Is there illegal child pornography on YouTube?

June 3, 2019 | by Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma

Federal Child Pornography Lawyer Discusses YouTube Algorithm | Law Office of 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 more videos that are similar, the Times reports.

That has the effect of turning harmless videos of children into “sexualized imagery.”

District court lowers sentence from 225 to 200 months after appeal. Still too long, appeals court says.

May 13, 2019 | 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 Joseph Vincent Jenkins, who was convicted after trial of transporting child porn on thumb drives and laptops as he traveled to his parents’ vacation home in Canada. The first sentence, 225 months, was too long because there was no basis for Chief Judge Glenn T. Suddaby’s conclusion that Jenkins was at a high risk to re-offend. Jenkins had never been convicted before, was not accused of attempting to harm a child, and “never spoke to, much less approached or touched, a child.”

This time, Judge Suddaby erroneously imposed nearly seventeen years on a first-time, non-violent, child pornography offender by cherry-picking studies that, he said, showed that sex crimes against children are much more common than what is reported. He found that studies show “inconsistent findings concerning the prevalence rate of sex offending by non-production offenders.” Judge Suddaby went on to note features of Jenkins’s personality identified in a competency report, which, he said were correlated with sexually dangerous behavior. Based on this analysis, Judge Suddaby concluded that “it was likely that Jenkins had committed a prior–undetected–sex offense, that he therefore had a high risk of recidivism, that a lengthy sentence was justified.”

Busted in NY? Three Ways it Will Be Easier to Win Your Case

April 23, 2019 | 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 handled. How will they affect your case? Read on.

First, “Discovery Reform” will replace the New York “Blindfold Law.” Under the current system, defense lawyers learn only what DAs want to tell them abut the case until the moment before trial. Under the new rules, starting on January 1, 2020, discovery is going to be “open, early and automatic.” That means that prosecutors will have to hand over all information about the case “as soon as practicable” but not more than 15 days after the defendant is arraigned, at least in most cases. And discovery is much broader than it ever was, including not just trial exhibits but also all witness statements, all grand jury minutes (not just of testifying witnesses), names and contact information for all potential witnesses, exculpatory information, and pretty much anything else in a prosecutor’s file. If you are being charged with a felony, you get your own statements at least 48 hours before the grand jury presentation–that can give you a chance to testify in the grand jury without worrying about getting tripped up by a statement you made previously to a detective. Perhaps most importantly, if the DA makes a plea offer, you are entitled to full discovery before the DA can withdraw the plea offer. Prosecutors cannot condition the plea offer on a waiver of discovery rights. No longer will defense lawyers ask for discovery during plea negotiations only to be told, sarcastically, “your client knows what he did.” Click the link for Part LLL of Chapter 59 of the New York State Laws of 2019, the full text of the new New York criminal discovery rules.

Second, you have a much better chance of getting released while your case is pending under New York state’s new bail rules. There will be mandatory release for all misdemeanors and non-violent felonies–except, of course, sex offenses (and cases involving contempt of domestic violence court orders). For more serious offenses, the court can only set money bail with the least restrictive conditions and with at least three options or ways to pay: cash, unsecured bond, and partially secured bond. Electronic monitoring can be used to prevent flight in serious cases, but you won’t have to pay for it and there are many limitations. If the court sets a monetary bail, it will have to consider the defendant’s ability to pay and any undue hardship, and it put its reasoning on the record. As a practical matter, the reforms should lead to fewer thoughtless decisions over bail that needlessly separate people from their families even though they are presumed to be innocent. Click the link for Part JJJ of Chapter 59 of the New York State Laws of 2019, which shows the amendments to the bail rules and Desk Appearance Ticket provisions.

Conviction Overturned for Client Accused of Importing over 100 Kilos of Heroin

April 9, 2019 | by Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma

Judge Raymond Dearie of the Eastern District of New York ruled yesterday that ZMOLAW client Adamou Djibo is entitled to a new trial because the government wrongfully withheld thousands of pages of relevant information from a cooperating witness’s cell phone. The reversal follows a remand from the Second Circuit: the appeals court directed the trial court to permit Djibo time and public funds to obtain a full translation of the material, which turned out to contain messages in Swahili that undercut the government’s theory that Djibo was the mastermind behind a ring that smuggled 100 kilos of heroin from Africa.

The government’s main evidence was the testimony of cooperating witness Stanley Walden, who struck a deal to testify against Djibo shortly after being stopped flying in to JFK with more than six kilos of low-grade heroin in a secret compartment in his suitcase. Walden protested that the drugs were not his, but belonged to Djibo and that he was just a courier. Text messages on his phone in English appeared to corroborate his claim, and the feds arrested Djibo as he boarded a flight to London a few weeks later.

The government handed over the English-language texts with Djibo, but nothing else from Walden’s phone, despite repeated requests many months before trial. Not relevant, said AUSA Karen Koniuszy. Texts on Djibo’s phone were suppressed because the border agents illegally searched it when he was stopped — but that’s another story.

Can Border Agents Search Your Cell Phone?

March 28, 2019 | by Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma

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Imagine you are met on the tarmac getting off a plane at JFK Terminal Two by armed customs officers. They tell you to come with them. They drive you to a secure area in Terminal Four, where foreigners are “processed” — i.e detained until they are admitted into the U.S. or sent to immigration custody. At Terminal Four, the officers do a normal customs search, then ask you to wait in a windowless room. Plainclothes investigators enter and tell you that they are going to search your cell phone and iPad. “No you are not,” you say. “I have a Fourth Amendment right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures.” They respond that the “protection of the Fourth Amendment does not apply at the U.S. border.” They give you a “choice” — you can leave, but you have to leave your cell phone and iPad behind to be searched. Or you can give them your passcodes and, if they don’t find anything on your devices, you can be on your way. You give them the passcodes. They find pictures they believe are child pornography — they are not — and take you away in handcuffs.

Is this a “routine” border search, or something else? Have your Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights been violated?

Those are questions that principal attorney Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma will argue tomorrow before a panel of judges at the New York Supreme Court Appellate Division, Second Department. The ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation argued in an amicus brief that, under these circumstances, a warrant based on probable cause is required to search the devices. The state believes the search was proper because a federal agent had some vague notion that a house associated with a family member of the defendant was at some point in the past used to download child pornography. We’ll argue that more is needed to justify a search of electronic items at the border, just like a warrant was required to search a cell phone incident to arrest in the 2014 Supreme Court case Riley v. California. Moreover, under these circumstances the provision of the passcodes was not a voluntary act but was the product of coercion, and thus information derived from the passcodes cannot be used against the defendant under the Fifth Amendment.

Court Rules NYPD Can’t Hide Body-Worn Camera Footage Behind § 50-a Law

March 13, 2019 | by Victoria Medley

Police in New York have been fighting to block the release of raw, unedited body-worn camera footage by claiming that the footage is a “personnel record” used for performance evaluations and therefore confidential under the Civil Rights Law. However, in a decision released last month, the First Department Appellate Division rejected this theory, which had been put forward by the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association. In PBA v. DeBlasio, et al., the Appellate Division held that privacy interests of police officers do not transform the bodycam footage into “personnel records” and therefore the footage must generally be released under the Freedom of Information Law.

Screen-Shot-2019-03-13-at-10.37.10-AM-1-275x300.png April 2017 marked the beginning of the NYPD’s body-worn camera program, which outfitted 1,300 police officers across 20 precincts with body cameras. The stated purpose of the program was to document the public’s interaction with police and establish a clear record of those encounters, as well as to provide evidence in civil or criminal proceedings. That purpose was quickly tested on September 6, 2017, when police responded to a report of a Bronx man acting erratically in his apartment. The police responded for a “wellness check” that escalated into a 15-minute standoff ending with the shooting and death of Miguel Richards at the hands of NYPD Officers, all of whom were equipped with body-worn cameras. Our office, along with the Law Offices of Daniel A. McGuinness, P.C., represents Mr. Richards’s family in a lawsuit against the City and the individual police officers.

The entire encounter was caught on tape.