The Appellate Division, Third Judicial Department, today unanimously affirmed a judgment the Firm had won two years ago, based upon a post-trial “440” motion, vacating the manslaughter conviction of client Gregory Thayer and granting him a new trial. The appeal was briefed by law firm principal Joel Rudin and Of Counsel Jacob Loup and was argued by Mr. Rudin.
The basis of the lower court’s ruling, and of the Appellate Division’s decision, was the ineffective assistance of a local lawyer hired by Mr. Thayer to assist his principal defense attorney, Robert C. Gottlieb, of Manhattan. Testimony Mr. Rudin elicited at an evidentiary hearing showed that, after Mr. Gottlieb indicated to the trial judge, sitting in Kingston, in upstate Ulster County, that Mr. Thayer intended to waive a jury and assert a defense of temporary insanity to the court only, the judge’s law clerk indicated to local counsel that the judge was not inclined to accept this defense and that the defendant would be better off with a jury. However, as the 440 court and the Appellate Division found, the law clerk asked the local lawyer to keep their meeting secret and the local lawyer, fearing for his own relationship with the judge and law clerk, failed to tell Mr. Gottlieb or their mutual client. The Appellate Division agreed with the 440 court that this failure not only deprived Mr. Thayer of his constitutional right to the effective assistance of counsel, but meant as well that his waiver of his absolute right to a jury trial was deficient. The Appellate Division’s decision may be found here. Our Brief may be found here.
Today, a Supreme Court judge in Brooklyn granted our law firm’s motion seeking the disclosure of secret grand jury transcripts from the 1996 murder prosecution of our client, Steven Lamont Ruffin. Steven spent 14 years in prison, from ages 17 through 31, before he was paroled. Many years later, his conviction was vacated by the Conviction Review Unit of the Brooklyn DA’s office on account of new evidence showing his innocence and he retained our law firm to prosecute his civil cases. It is difficult to obtain grand jury minutes, but the court was convinced that our client’s need for such materials in aid of his civil rights lawsuits outweighs any interest in grand jury secrecy. The decision may be viewed here. Associates Samuel Kuhn and Partha Sharma briefed the motion.
Today law firm principal Joel B. Rudin and associate Samuel Kuhn published an editorial in the New York Daily News on the New York State Bivens Act. The piece describes how the law, passed last month as part of the larger state budget bill, provides New Yorkers a powerful new tool to fight federal law enforcement abuse by creating a private cause of action for lawsuits seeking monetary damages against all governmental officials. Previously, such lawsuits were only permitted against state and local law enforcement in most cases. As federal immigration officials threaten a surge of immigration enforcement in New York City, the NYS Bivens Act will help hold them accountable to the rule of law.
The article may be viewed here.
Today, the Buffalo News reported our firm’s settlement of the John Walker wrongful conviction case: $21 million to be paid by Erie County, on top of the $4.35 million already paid to our client by the City of Buffalo in connection with the same case. It is reportedly the largest civil settlement ever paid by Erie County. John Walker was convicted in 1977 of a murder the previous year that he did not commit and served a total of 21 years in prison. Erie County prosecutors used evidence fabricated by the Buffalo police at trial while failing to disclose up to 21 pieces of additional evidence showing that the witnesses were unlawfully coerced, that Mr. Walker could not have committed the crime, and that one or both of two other suspects likely did. Together with the international law firm WilmerHale, led by partner Ross Firsenbaum, and Buffalo attorney Spencer Durland, Joel Rudin and David Rudin of our firm won an historic $28 million jury verdict in March, 2025 for Mr. Walker. At the time, it was the largest jury award ever in the United States against a municipality for a wrongful conviction. That amount was eclipsed in November 2025 when our same team of lawyers won an $80 million jury award for the Estate of Darryl Boyd, Mr. Walker’s co-defendant back in 1977. Mr. Walker agreed to settle because he is in ill health and wished to avoid a lengthy delay while the County appealed. In today’s article, the main trial prosecutor, Timothy Drury, who testified at both trials and obviously was disbelieved by the two juries, tried to blame Erie County’s attorneys. Joel Rudin was quoted as saying that if Drury wants to find someone to blame, “he should look in the mirror.”
Law Firm principal Joel Rudin today was honored by the highly prestigious American College of Trial Lawyers at a conference in Palm Springs, California, for his role in winning an $80 million damage award for his client, the Estate of Darryl Boyd, in November, 2025, in Rochester, New York. Joel presented to an audience of more than 500 attendees, together with his co-counsel in the Boyd case, Ross Firsenbaum of the international law firm, WilmerHale, and Spencer Durland of Hoover & Durland in Buffalo. Darryl Boyd was convicted in 1977 due to prosecutorial misconduct: the suppression of favorable evidence known as Brady material and an improper summation. During their presentation, Joel, Ross and Spencer used Power Point slides and video recordings of deposition testimony to show how they and their team of more than 15 attorneys and paralegals pieced together and presented the civil case. Earlier in 2025, the same team recovered $28 million in damages on behalf of Darryl Boyd’s original codefendant, John Walker, who spent 22 years in prison in the same case.
Today Jennifer Gonnerman published in The New Yorker Magazine website a full length feature article on our upstate New York case, the “Buffalo Five.” Last year, in two federal civil rights trials held in Rochester, N.Y., our firm, together with co-counsel WilmerHale and Hoover & Durland, recovered a total of $108 million in compensatory damages for our clients, John Walker and Darryl Boyd, for their wrongful convictions, back in 1977, for murder in Buffalo. The $80 million verdict for Darryl Boyd in November 2025 is the largest jury award ever in this country for a wrongful conviction. The article, which can also be seen here, tells the story of the injustice from the point of view of the prosecution’s main witness, Tyrone Woodruff, who was coerced to lie.
The Appellate Division, Second Department, today granted our firm’s appeal of the dismissal of our client Julio Negron’s Unjust Conviction or Section 8-b claim seeking damages for his 10 years’ imprisonment for an attempted murder he did not commit. We previously won Mr. Negron a $6.25 settlement of his claims against the City of New York brought in federal court. We will now seek a date for trial of Mr. Negron’s claim.
The Appellate Division’s decision today is an important precedent preventing the dismissal of cases like Mr. Negron’s on a mere technicality. The State Attorney General’s office has obtained dismissals of claims such as Mr. Negron’s where the court that overturned the claimant’s original criminal conviction did not make clear the section of the Criminal Procedure Law it was acting under. Here, in Mr. Negron’s case, the New York Court of Appeals discussed how the trial prosecutor engaged in fraudulent behavior in persuading the trial judge not to allow a defense that a third party committed the crime while concealing evidence that tended to prove the guilt of the third party. The State Court of Claims judge dismissed the case because the Court of Appeals, in its decision, did not specify that it was relying on a subsection of Criminal Procedure Law 440.10 dealing with fraud by a prosecutor. The Appellate Division, in its decision today, held that such a case cannot be dismissed where the claimant alleges that a prosecutor’s fraud was the basis for the previous court’s decision. That the court that overturned the conviction did not explicitly state on what ground it was overturning the conviction cannot be a bar to the lawsuit.
Senior Associate David Rudin successfully argued the appeal. Jacob Loup, Of Counsel to the firm, wrote the firm’s opening and reply briefs. Read the decision here, our opening brief here, and our reply brief here.
A jury in Rochester, N.Y., returned a verdict of $80 Million against Erie County, N.Y. – the largest wrongful conviction civil damage award in U.S. history – on behalf of our firm’s client, Estate of Darryl Boyd, following a 2 ½ week trial. Darryl Boyd and his original codefendant, John Walker, were convicted in 1977 in Buffalo, N.Y., for a murder they did not commit. Darryl spent a total of 28 years in prison for this crime; John spent 21 years. Following the overturning of their convictions in 2021, Darryl and John retained our firm to bring a damages action on their behalf; we brought in the international law firm, WilmerHale, together with a Buffalo law firm, Hoover & Durland, and together we won this victory as well as a prior civil trial for John Walker in April, recovering $28 million for John. The $28 million verdict already was the largest verdict ever against a municipality in this country for misconduct by a prosecutor. See coverage of our historic victory in The New York Times here, the New York Law Journal here, Law360 here, and the Buffalo News here. The Law360 article credits our law firm with developing the entire area of law of municipal liability for prosecutorial misconduct that allowed this verdict to be achieved.
The American Lawyer magazine today announced our law firm’s nomination, together with the international law firm WilmerHale and Buffalo’s Hoover & Durland, for its annual “Best Provider Collaboration” award for our work together earlier this year in achieving a $28 million verdict for our client John Walker. The record-setting verdict was handed down by a federal jury in Rochester, NY, to compensate Mr. Walker for his 21 years in prison on a wrongful 1977 conviction in Buffalo for a murder he did not commit. To obtain this verdict, our team had to uncover and present evidence that misconduct by Erie County prosecutors had resulted from unlawful policies and practices of the Erie County District Attorney. We could not recover from the prosecutors themselves because all prosecutors are protected from civil liability by the doctrine of absolute immunity. This is believed to be the largest jury award ever against a municipality based upon misconduct by a prosecutor.
Today, The AmLaw Litigation Daily recognized Joel Rudin and co-counsel Ryanne Perio of WilmerHale and Spencer Durland of Hoover & Durland as its “Litigators of the Week” for their work in obtaining a $28 million verdict for John Walker, a 65-year-old man who was wrongfully convicted in 1977 of a murder he did not commit in Buffalo, New York, when he was just 17. The Litigation Daily’s coverage contains extensive discussion by Mr. Rudin, Ms. Perio, and Mr. Durland of the extraordinary collaboration between their firms in litigating this case from inception through trial over a period of more than three years, and the strategies they used to obtain just compensation for Mr. Walker. You can read the coverage here and read more about the Walker case here.