Representative Cases

Justifiable Homicide

I met a fellow in jail who told me that he wanted to plead guilty in a homicide case because he wanted Jesus Christ to forgive him. He said he had taken a gun and killed somebody. But after talking to him for five minutes, I learned that the person he had killed was a drug dealer who had threatened to kill him. The drug dealer was armed and my client had bought the gun to protect himself. I felt he had a viable justification defense. At his trial six months later, a jury listened to his testimony and acquitted him in less than an hour. I didn’t permit him to plead guilty to ease his conscience, and his children are glad about that because now he’s free.

A False Accusation

My client was involved an 11-year odyssey of chasing around the country to get access to his children, which included a son with autism. After his son was found by child welfare officials to have welts following a visit, my client was accused of inflicting excessive corporal punishment on his child. He was arrested and spent the night in jail. However, children who have autism often have a condition called dispracxia, which is an impairment in the organization of movement. The child had been bouncing on the bed and gave himself a bruise before the visit with the father. The accusation was simply the latest ploy by the mother to deny visitation rights. We discovered that she wanted to leave New York to live with her new boyfriend in northern Canada. We tried the criminal case to a jury and my client was acquitted in 20 minutes. Today my client has joint physical custody of his son.

A Call from Bellevue

One night a woman called me from a pay phone to retain my services in a divorce case. The pay phone located in mental ward at Bellevue hospital, where the woman was confined following a suicide attempt in which her stomach was pumped. She told me that she had made the suicide attempt because she became despondent after her husband told her he was going to take her children away from her by claiming she had mental health problems. While she was in the intensive care unit, her husband served her with divorce papers. During her child custody trial, the judge was very impressed by one of the questions I asked her husband during cross examination: “Did you think that serving your wife with divorce papers while she was in the hospital following a suicide attempt was going to help to make her better?” The husband withdrew his case the next day.

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