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Prosecutors in New York state who commit even egregious misconduct are virtually untouchable. In today’s New York Times, Nina Morrison of the Innocence Project chronicles a Suffolk County homicide prosecutor who not only held back exculpatory evidence, but doctored documents to try to actively hide them from the court. After a little digging, it turned out that the same prosecutor, Glenn Kurtzrock, was responsible for misconduct in four additional cases. If you or I did that, we would go to jail.

But not a prosecutor.

As Ms. Morrison writes: “So what’s happened to Mr. Kurtzrock? Nothing. Thirteen months after his public firing, and five murder cases overturned because of his illegal actions, Mr. Kurtzrock hasn’t been charged with a single crime. Not fraud, not tampering with government records, not contempt of court.” Moreover, he cannot be sued. A long line of Supreme Court cases gives prosecutors “absolute immunity” from civil rights suits, even when they directly violate someone’s constitutional right to exculpatory evidence, as Mr. Kurtzrock apparently did.

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Under the Sex Offender Registration Act, registered sex offenders must tell New York State about all “internet accounts with internet access providers” and “internet identifiers that such offender uses.” Does that mean you have to disclose your social media accounts?

Most police and the the State Division of Criminal Justice Services would have said yes. Police agencies routinely scour the internet looking for sex offenders who are on social media but have not properly disclosed their presence. People always thought hiding a social media account was a felony — failure to register under Corrections Law Sec. 168-t.

Turns out it is not.

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https://www.zmolaw.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Screen-Shot-2018-05-09-at-10.26.52-AM-300x298.pngThe abrupt resignation of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman Monday night left the legal community scratching its head. How could such a bright star, who consistently used the power of his office to fight for just causes, especially for women, have fallen in such rapid and spectacular fashion?

The answer, of course, is that people are complicated.

Schneiderman’s initial response to the New Yorker’s story about four women accusing him of abuse was not encouraging: in a statement quoted in the article he asserted that he never assaulted anyone but admitted he engaged in “role-playing and other consensual sexual activity” in the “privacy of intimate relationships.”  In essence, he told the New Yorker he didn’t do it, but if he did do it, it was consensual.

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Last week, President Trump signed legislation that expands criminal liability for people who own or operate online platforms that “promote or facilitate” not only sex trafficking, but virtually any consensual sex work. The new law, which amends Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (“CDA”), is commonly referred to as the “Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (“FOSTA”), or by its Senate name, the “Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA).”

The FOSTA-SESTA amendment to the CDA is fairly short, but raises questions about how it will be enforced by prosecutors and plaintiffs’ attorneys granted a private right of action under the law. Under the new law:

  1. Anyone who “owns, manages, or operates” an online platform or “conspires or attempts to do
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A new law should close an “egregious loophole” that had allowed police officers who sexually assault prisoners to defend themselves by claiming their prisoner consented to the sexual activity. That’s the last thing an 18-year-old woman using the pseudonym Anna Chambers expected to hear when she filed rape charges against two New York City detectives last year.

https://www.zmolaw.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Screen-Shot-2018-04-03-at-12.16.52-PM-300x171.pngAccording to Buzzfeed News, in September 2017, Detectives Eddie Martins and Richard Hall stopped Chambers and two friends after allegedly spotting marijuana in the front cupholder of their car. They took Chambers into custody but let her friends go. Then, according to the Buzzfeed report, Martins and Hall forced Chambers into an unmarked police van, where they took turns raping her for almost an hour. Eventually, she was released onto the side of the road. She immediately contacted a friend, who rushed her to the hospital to complete a rape kit. The DNA collected from the kit matched both Martins and Hall, according to Buzzfeed. Chambers assumed that her case against the detectives was a slam dunk: after all, there was positive proof that they had sex with her after detaining her and while they were on duty.

The last thing Chambers expected was for Martins and Hall to claim consent. Remarkably, even though it is illegal for parole officers or corrections officers to have sex with people in jail, the same standard did not apply to police officers who take people into custody. Buzzfeed reported that New York was one of 35 states with a legal loophole that permits law enforcement officials to have consensual sexual relations with detainees in their custody.

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Victoria-Medley-headshot-225x300New York City criminal defense and civil rights lawyer Victoria N. Medley, Esq. has joined the Law Office of Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma as an associate, expanding our reach, capacity and expertise in New York’s state and federal courts.  Ms. Medley comes to us from the firm of Perlmutter & McGuinness, P.C., which recently dissolved when leading criminal attorney Adam Perlmutter became a judge on the New York City Criminal Court. Our office continues to work with the newly-formed Law Offices of Daniel A. McGuinness, PC on high-impact civil rights cases. Ms. Medley was part of the team that won a $26 million settlement last year for two wrongfully convicted men.

Ms. Medley graduated from Brooklyn Law School in 2014, where she led the school’s local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. While still in law school, she interned with Gideon’s Promise, a non-profit that supports public defenders.  In that position, Ms. Medley second-chaired two trials and assisted in felony, magistrate, and family court matters.  After graduating, she completed a fellowship at the Legal Aid Society’s Criminal Appeals Bureau, where she represented indigent clients appealing their cases.

At the Law Office of Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma, Ms. Medley will focus on defending individuals accused of serious crimes including fraud, sex crimes, and computer crimes. She will also continue her work on behalf  victims of civil rights abuses, including prisoners who suffer sexual abuse and individuals injured by police misconduct. Her presence will allow us to expand our criminal and civil rights practices, providing zealous advocacy for individuals and ensuring that their rights under the First, Fourth, Fifth, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments are secured and promoted.

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Under the regulations implementing New York’s Sex Offender registration act, a person who “has a history of drug or alcohol abuse” is considered at higher risk for re-offense, and can be assessed with points that lead to a higher risk level. In People v. Weber the defendant was found with bags of marijuana at the time of his arrest and on a prior occasion. The hearing court assessed him points in the drug abuse category, pushing him over the line into Level Two. Level Two requires publication of an offenders information on the internet and lifetime registration.

But in an opinion handed down yesterday, the First Department Appellate Division, disagreed. The People had to show that either that the defendant had a history of abuse or that the drugs were somehow connected to the crime at issue. The Appellate Division reversed the Level Two adjudication because “even assuming [the defendant] could be found to have been a marijuana user, such use was not established to be more than occasional social use, and thus would not warrant the assessment of points under the risk factor for drug abuse.” That put the defendant down to Level One, requiring twenty years of registration, but no internet notification.

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https://www.zmolaw.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Screen-Shot-2018-03-14-at-3.10.35-PM-300x228.jpgA year ago, Gov. Mario Cuomo granted clemency to our client Felipe Rodriguez, commuting his life sentence to the 27 years he had already served for a 1987 murder. Felipe, who is also represented by Nina Morrison of the Innocence Project, was released because he was an incredible inmate: he had renovated the rectory in one prison and replaced the plumbing in another; he brought Cardinal Dolan to pray with the men on Easter and recruited writers from among the inmates for a prison newsletter. He was so respected by prison authorities that he was put in charge of caustic chemicals at Eastern Correctional Facility.

Felipe Rodriguez is also innocent. He was wrongly convicted of murdering a young Brooklyn mother named Maureen Fernandez and leaving her body behind a warehouse in Queens. His conviction was based on two pieces of evidence: (1) testimony of a drunk who identified Felipe a year-and-a-half after the murder as someone he briefly saw in a bar with the victim the night she was killed and (2) testimony from Javier Ramos, a friend of Mr. Rodriguez who had admitted to falsely accusing someone else of the murder because he was afraid of the police. No physical evidence, DNA, fingerprints or other forensics of any kind ever linked Felipe to the crime.

As the Daily News reported on Christmas Eve: “The case against Felipe Rodriguez was, at first, a case of no’s. No witnesses. No motive. No connection between Rodriguez and Fernandez. No DNA evidence. No criminal record. No history of violence. No knife. No description of bloodstains on the clothing of the man presumed to be the killer.”

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https://www.zmolaw.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Screen-Shot-2017-10-17-at-11.20.45-PM-300x127.pngWhen officials at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility found out our client, Yekatrina Pusepa, was in an illicit relationship with a prison guard they did nothing to protect her. Instead, they held her out as bait. And when she would not cooperate with them, they threw her in solitary confinement based on trumped up charges. While in solitary, she was left alone with a notoriously violent inmate who had threatened her before — and was able to brutally attack her because of official indifference. Those are the charges in a new lawsuit brought by the Law Office of Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma and Perlmutter & McGuinness, P.C. in federal court in Manhattan.

The suit is one of at least three pending suits against the New York prison system based on what is alleged to be routine abuse and inadequate protection of women prisoners. In Pusepa’s case, the lawsuit alleges that prison officials bungled their investigation, which ultimately led to minor criminal charges lodged against her assailant, former C.O. Ruben Illa, by re-victimizing Ms. Pusepa at every turn. An official told Pusepa that the prison was aware that she was in a relationship with Illa. Under New York law, inmates are not legally capable of consenting to sexual contact with corrections officers, and therefore all sexual contact between inmates and officers is considered non-consensual. Such contact therefore violates the Eighth Amendment. But, according to the suit, the prison continued to allow Illa to work with Pusepa, even letting him swap shifts with another guard so that he could spend more time with her.

The other lawsuit, also brought by the Margulis-Ohnuma and Perlmutter & McGuinness firms, attempts to hold prison officials responsible for forcible sexual abuse by another guard at Bedford Hills, who was prosecuted for forcibly touching our client.

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Former Congressman Anthony Weiner was just sentenced to 21 months in prison for sexting with a 15-year-old. At sentencing, his lawyer asked that he be sent to FCI Schuylkill in Pennsylvania. That seems to have been a mistake: Schuylkill is a medium-security prison, filled with violent offenders and replete with restrictive rules. Schuylkill has a satellite camp, but as a sex offender, Weiner is not eligible (he gets the “Sex Offender Public Safety Factor” and therefore must go to a secure facility). There are low-security federal prisons that would be far more pleasant and conducive to the year-and-a-half or so of introspective atonement that Weiner will endure while he waits to go to a halfway house. The New York Times wrote about Weiner’s placement in federal prison, but, unfortunately, just about everything in their story was wrong.

The bottom line is that “designation” to a particular federal prison is a complicated process with far-reaching consequences. Experiences in federal prison vary widely. Camps like the ones at Schuylkill and Otisville are unsecured and generally not unpleasant places to be. Contrast that with the “ADX” at Florence, Colorado, which is reserved for the most dangerous criminals in the United States and drives many of its residents mad. The Bureau of Prisons decides where you will go in the weeks after sentencing at a central facility in Grand Prairie, Texas. They rely on the Presentence Investigation Report (known as the PSR) for facts about you and plug those into a formula that determines your security level. It is essential that the information in the PSR is accurate as any mistake could change which facility you end up in. There is a small industry of experts who keep up with the daily changes in conditions within the Bureau of Prisons and can advocate for a particular designation. The process is laid out in this 108-page BOP policy.

The New York Times missed most of this in talking about Weiner, whose situation is not too different from many first-time federal offenders, including people convicted of child pornography. Being a former congressman and pledging himself to “a rigorous curriculum of rehabilitation and therapy” probably make no difference at all. Whatever his lawyer may have believed (and it does not seem like they thought about it beforehand), there is zero chance he would have been assigned to a prison in New York City: the three federal jails in New York are reserved for inmates who are awaiting sentencing or witnesses for the government, plus a small cadre of trusted inmates near the end of their terms who work in the local jails.

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