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 as a sole proprietorship), and we had revamped our website into a thing of beauty.
But developments out in the world got ahead of us.
Instead, I am pleased to announce that I have filed a grievance against fellow attorney Rudolph William Giuliani for, in essence, trying to stage a violent overthrow of American democracy. Our attorneys are defending a young man sued by a passel of whiny white supremacists whose real names he published so they could not cower behind internet anonymity and euphemism as they spewed bile under the guise of defending “European Heritage.” We have assembled a team defending a Russian national who was extradited from Bulgaria for computer fraud and has been sitting in the COVID infested federal jail for almost two years waiting for his trial to begin. I will link to the court papers soon, probably sometime after the president is impeached for a second time.
We live in strange times.
I have always decried magical thinking driven by fear which is behind many criminal prosecutions, leading to untold needless human suffering. But most of my adversaries are typically well-meaning but misguided prosecutors… and now they are Nazis and traitors?
Worse, even relatively uncontroversial prosecutions now can lead to horrible illness and unnecessary death when prosecutors and courts resist applications for bail or compassionate release. More than 1,700 of the 275,000 people behind bars confirmed to be infected with COVID-19 had died by late December. The infection rate is three times higher than in the general public because transmission is unavoidable in a prison setting; many guards do not comply with mask mandates as they go back and forth from crowded prisons to their communities. But the death rate is lower—since we mostly lock up young people, including lots of children. And the real numbers are no doubt dramatically higher, because testing in jail is scarce and prison administrators go to extraordinary lengths to hide problems behind the walls.
So happy announcements about the PLLC and Tess and the new website will have to wait. Innocent clients who are out of prison, but waiting for a court to clear their names, will have to wait. Civil litigation that compensates the wrongfully convicted and holds police accountable will have to wait. There are white supremacists and insurrectionists trying to destroy everything we hold dear. Most of all, there are people in prison that need to get home, right now, before they get sick, before they die.