By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma Having sex with a 17-year-old is not a federal crime. Having sex with a 17-year-old is not a crime under most state laws. But paying to have sex with a 17-year-old? With Venmo? That is a whole other story. Practically any involvement (“recruits, entices, harbors, transports, provides, obtains, advertises, maintains, patronizes, or solicits by any means a person”) with a commercial sex act involving someone under 18 constitutes federal sex trafficking. It carries a ten-year mandatory minimum prison sentence under 18 U.S.C. Sec. 1591. The maximum sentence is life. And ..read more

When the Hon. Paul B. Wojtaszek of Erie County Supreme Court vacated our client’s 30-year-old conviction last year, we were confident—maybe overconfident—that was the end of the story. James Pugh had been wrongly convicted of the 1993 murder of a young mother in Tonawanda, New York and served 26 years in prison for the crime he did not commit. After all, Judge Wojtaszek was skeptical of our arguments, solicitous of the prosecutors, and careful to cover all bases in ruling that Jimmy had been denied access to exculpatory evidence and that new DNA results excluding him from the murder scene woul ..read more

By Anne Ayotte ZMO Law PLLC Paralegal Specialist An Eastern District of New York judge has joined SDNY Judge Jesse Furman in refusing to send a defendant to the Metropolitan Detention Center because of the abhorrent, violent conditions at New York City’s only jail for people accused of federal crimes. On August 5th, defendant Daniel Colucci pled guilty to a significant tax fraud, unlawfully diverting more than $1 million dollars in federal taxes intended to fund public-good programs. A crime like that would normally warrant a term of imprisonment between 18-24 months under the U.S. Sentencing ..read more

ZMO Law client Alvin Alston was framed by police in 1987 murder of a Queens doctor. The same police framed Felipe Rodriguez—leading to 27 years in New York State prison for the wrongful conviction, exoneration, and $23.5 million in settlements. Alvin’s case is now pending in Queens Supreme Court: after a nine-year investigation, Alvin has finally moved to vacate his conviction on the basis that the single eyewitness identification was unreliable, he had an alibi that the jury never heard, and he is actually innocent of the murder. Here is his story. *** It’s a sunny afternoon in Ridgewood, Que ..read more

By Emily FUrman While most New Yorkers enjoy their Easter and Passover meals this Spring, dozens of MDC Brooklyn detainees endure a different kind of cuisine— dishes tainted by maggots and weevils, according to reports by several Federal Defenders. Despite MDC officials confirming such gross contaminations, inmates continue to be served insect-laden meals.  Bug-infested food is only the latest episode in a long string of below-par conditions and neglect at the federal Bureau of Prisons’ Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, which houses 1,600 New York City detainees waiting for their ..read more

By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma I woke up this morning to the tenth anniversary of the most important day of my legal career and an even more important day in the life of my treasured client, Antonio Yarbough. On February 6, 2014, Antonio and his co-defendant Sharrif Wilson walked out of Supreme Court in Brooklyn as free men. They had been locked away for 7,903 days for a horrific triple homicide committed by someone else. The killer struck again seven years later, leaving his semen inside the body of his victim, just as he left his skin cells under the fingernails of Tony’s mother, Annie Yarbough ..read more

By Emily Furman Remember Dustin Hoffman's iconic "I'm walkin' here!"? It's a phrase on the tongue of every New Yorker, but a recent New York State court decision has given street hollers a new level of seriousness. In 2017, Mr. Fabian Greene was convicted of one count of fourth degree larceny and two counts of first degree perjury, landing him a four-to-eight year sentence. His crime? Running away with a stranger's phone during a biker-and-jaywalker screaming match gone wrong. Greene is now serving a lengthy sentence for snatching a phone, during an argument, that was returned to its owner wit ..read more

New York Governor Kathy Hochul swiftly signed the Rape is Rape bill into law this week, purporting to reform New York’s criminal sexual assault and rape statutes to make them fairer to survivors. While the new laws are somewhat more rational, they tend to expand the scope of the rape statutes in a way that is at best meaningless and at worst could lower the burden of proof for prosecutors trying to lock people up for rape. Read overly broadly, they could even make it possible to commit rape “over clothing.” The new laws go into effect next fall and generally won’t affect currently pending case ..read more

By Tess Cohen At the end of the year, Governor Hochul vetoed two hard fought bills advocated for by criminal justice reformers. Though the signing of Clean Slate remains a huge win for advocates, two bills aimed directly at injustices in the system were rejected by the Governor over the winter holidays. The first seems like a minor and wonky change — it would have prevented prosecutors from requiring individuals pleading guilty to waive their right to appeal of suppression decisions by lower court judges. So how would this bill have curbed police misconduct? Right now in New York State court ..read more

By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma United States Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor died Friday. She will be remembered as the first woman justice, a fearless Republican who put principles of liberty and the rule of law above her personal distaste for abortion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992, a case that safeguarded a woman’s right to choose for the following thirty years. But for criminal lawyers — and especially for their clients — Justice O’Connor’s most important opinion was written eight years earlier and would come to define how we do our jobs for three generations of criminal defe ..read more