I am a Cleveland based attorney licensed to practice law in the State of Ohio and a member of the Ohio State Bar Association. I am a gradute of Cleveland-Marshall College of Law and The Ohio State University. I am located in Cleveland and available to those who have been arrested, charged with a crime, or are the subject of a criminal investigation in Ohio. For all but the most serious matters, I offer an upfront flat fee pricing model. If you are facing legal difficulties, I am happy to sit down with you for a free consultation. If I am unable to help you, I will help you find the person who is.
I graduated cum laude from Cleveland-Marhshall College of Law with a concentration in criminal law. While at Cleveland-Marshall, I gained valuable experience outside the classroom. I worked at the United States Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Ohio Criminal Division, where I conducted legal research and drafted documents including suppression motions, sentencing memoranda and an appellate brief for use in federal court. I worked at the Cuyahoga County Public Defenders Office, where I drafted numerous procedural motions, suppression motions, and helped members of the public seeking to seal their criminal records. I also participated in the St. Petersburg Summer Law Institute program in St. Petersburg, Russia, where I studied international law alongside Russian law students from St. Petersburg State University and Novgorod University. I served as Executive Submissions Editor for The Global Business Law Review, a student run publication providing a forum for discussion of legal issues relating to international business. Finally, I had the honor of traveling to the Seychelles, an island nation in the Indian Ocean, to work for a Seychelles Supreme Court judge on two Somalian pirate cases.
Modern sea piracy law is still in its infancy. Both cases I worked on in the Seychelles made significant contributions to its development. The first marked the first case in which a piracy conviction was sustained entirely on circumstantial evidence. The second precedent for imposing reduced sentences on juvenile offenders while simaltaneously considering the involvement of juvenile offenders an aggravating circumstance in the adults' case. In that case, The Republic v. Liban Dahir & Twelve Others, two of the accused became the first Somalian piracy suspects to take the stand in their own defense. Furthermore, the case resulted in the first, and to my knowledge the only, acquittal of a Somalian piracy suspect due to the prosecution's failure to make a special showing with regard to one defendant, which showing was required by law due to the suspect's extreme youth. For the convenience of anyone with an interest in this case, a link to the court's judgement entry explaining the verdict is available in the Links section.