News/Commentary

Leftist Bronx DA candidate brags about her work with SA victims, but conveniently hides defending predators

June 10, 2023 | | Print Article

Bronx District Attorney candidate Tess Cohen is a far-left Democrat who touts her history of defending sexual assault victims via her campaign website but conveniently leaves out the fact that she also specializes in getting sentences reduced or thrown out for sexual predators.

Cohen is a former prosecutor in the Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor. Her selling point as district attorney is that she is a champion for sexual assault victims. She crows about her efforts to “support and amplify the voices of victims who are often ignored or further traumatized by the criminal legal system.”

The only problem with that claim is she IS the criminal legal system.

According to the New York Post, she omitted from her biography that she started out as an “of counsel” attorney in January 2021 at New York City-based ZMO Law, which focuses “on clients accused of child pornography [and] other sex crimes … as well as serious state offenses like sexual assault,” according to the law firm’s website.

“Tess Cohen is a criminal defense and civil rights attorney who focuses on fighting back against some of the worst criminal justice system abuses suffered by New Yorkers. She currently represents people in both state and federal criminal court cases and has been advocating for several wrongfully convicted clients who are seeking to overturn their convictions. She also represents victims of sexual assault in civil and criminal court, helping to support and amplify the voices of victims who are often ignored or further traumatized by the criminal legal system,” her website proclaims.

ZMO’s client list includes Darnell Feagins, whose criminal record details his molesting a 12-year-old when he was 24. He pleaded guilty in Brooklyn Supreme Court in 2012, according to court documents.

Eight years after that heinous act, Feagins was arrested in the Bronx and indicted in Manhattan Federal Court. He reportedly had in his possession phones that purportedly contained over 1,200 pornographic images and videos showing children in unspeakable circumstances. He pleaded guilty in December to the degraded smut and will be sentenced on June 15. That’s just two days before early voting begins in the primary elections.

An advocate for victims of child sex abuse named Stephen Jimenez thrashed Cohen for her decision to leave out working for ZMO. Jimenez was repeatedly assaulted by a pedophile in the Bronx when he was a child.

“The last thing I want as a survivor of child sex abuse [is] an attorney or public servant or a DA putting misleading information out there about who she’s representing and why,” Jimenez asserted.

He also contended that Cohen “mentions she defends people that are wrongfully convicted, but in this instance, one of her clients is someone who was convicted of one of the worst crimes.”

In an interview with the New York Post, Cohen claimed she is “proud” to represent all of her clients.

“Some of my clients are falsely accused, some are guilty, some are victims of sexual assault themselves, but all receive the opportunity for a fair trial when I am their attorney,” she proclaimed.

ZMO founder Zachary Margulis-Ohnum has for years raged that New York State is too tough on sex offenders.

In a blog post on the firm’s website, Margulis-Ohnuma decried the “scarlet letter of sex offender registration,” contending that in many cases it had “no identifiable benefit to public safety.”

He wrote a piece on the site ahead of the 2022 legislative session in Albany where he charged that there had been “a quiet struggle in New York State to ease the irrational burdens on people convicted of sex offenses.”

Margulis-Ohnuma told the New York Post in an interview that in many American jurisdictions, punishments for people convicted of sex crimes “are overly punitive and are not rationally based on the specific harms by sex offenses.”

Cohen has raised more than $127,000 in campaign funding since June 2022. At least five of those contributions came from ZMO staff, totaling $1,150 according to the state Board of Elections.

Cohen will face off against incumbent Darcel Clark who was re-elected to office in November 2019.

Margulis-Ohnuma claimed he contributed to Cohen’s campaign because “she understands the built-in inequities of the criminal justice system in ways that the current DA doesn’t understand.”

Cohen describes herself as a “very progressive prosecutor.” She has also repeatedly said she is anti-police. She is promising to shut down Rikers Island and “release as many people as possible” from its jails according to the New York Post.

“My goal is to reduce the footprint of the criminal justice system in the Bronx,” Cohen stated, according to The Indypendent.

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