Success Stories

Head of our DWI and Vehicular Crimes Unit, Steven Epstein, describes a recent case:

"This client's story will not get any media attention. It did not result from a jury trial. It will largely go unnoticed to the world, but it exemplifies so much of the successes we have and what we do to help our clients and change their lives.

"Our client was charged in Brooklyn with Vehicular Homicide in an accident that resulted in the death of one person and serious injury to another. He faced up to 25 years in prison. He did cocaine but that was much earlier in time but he was not impaired by it at the time of the accident. The prosecution disagreed but they got it wrong. It would take a miracle to prevent an indictment.

"Though the case had been presented to a grand jury we convinced the DA to withdraw it because our client was innocent of the charges. To their credit, the DA withdrew the case from the grand jury and worked with our office and our amazing experts as we worked together with the prosecution and investigated what transpired.

"Ultimately, the client pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident only. He will not do any jail time. He will keep his licenses to do his job and keep his career.

The firm represents a local Nassau County resident who had been involved in an emotional separation from his girlfriend, after which his employer received an anonymous email attacking him and attaching videos of his text messages with other romantic interests. Shortly after this email, he was removed from his white collar job responsibilities for his local municipality, was given remedial tasks instead at its Parks and Recreations department, and was passed over for promotions and raises that he was otherwise well qualified to obtain.

Arising from this setting, he sued his ex-girlfriend—alleging, among other things, that she had written the anonymous email and tortiously interfered with his business. After the close of discovery, she moved for summary judgment—claiming that he lacked sufficient evidence of her authorship, and denying that his experience at work formed a cognizable basis for damages in light of the fact that he was not technically fired.

Led by Alexander Klein, BEKAL opposed the motion—coming forward with comprehensive evidence surrounding the circumstances of the email as well as subpoenaed records showing the extent to which he had been passed over for promotions and raises given to less qualified colleagues. And on July 10, 2025, the Court agreed—denying the summary judgment motion in its entirety, and paving the way for trial in this action.

“The Court recognized our fundamental view of this case,” said Klein. “Our adversary can deny having written this damaging email, but the body to evaluate that denial is not a judge on motion practice but a jury after trial. We look forward to giving a jury that opportunity.”

Read the decision and motion papers, here:

Decision

Motion

Wrongful convictions remain one of the most devastating injustices in our criminal legal system, with researchers estimating that approximately 100,000 innocent people are currently incarcerated for a crime they did not commit. When people are wrongfully convicted, they lose their freedom, their reputation, and their dignity. Beyond this, their loved ones and communities suffer as additional victims of these miscarriages of justice. This results in increased generational trauma, financial difficulties, and mental health problems for families. Additionally, the problems of wrongful conviction extend beyond fairness and justice to include public safety, since actual perpetrators remain at large and often continue to endanger the community.

To address the ongoing crisis of wrongful convictions in this country, Martin Tankleff (himself an exoneree who spent nearly 18 years in prison before his exoneration) and Marc Howard (Tankleff’s childhood friend) started an undergraduate course at Georgetown University in 2018. This 5-credit course—called “Making an Exoneree” (MAE) —is unique in multiple respects. Over the course of each spring semester, a group of 15 highly motivated undergraduate students reinvestigate potential wrongful conviction cases and create campaigns advocating for release or exoneration, including eight-minute documentary films portraying the main issues, challenges, injustices, and human stories involved in each case. When Marc and Marty started Making an Exoneree, they drew on their own experience, given that Marty’s exoneration would not have been possible without zealous reinvestigation, sustained media attention, and public pressure. Thus, Making an Exoneree was born out of a vision for utilizing what we often refer to as “secret weapons”: undergraduate students who pour their hearts into reinvestigating cases and can help bring them out of obscurity.

Since its founding, MAE has developed as a program with staff dedicated to reviewing case applications and supporting students in their advocacy for our cases. We successfully expanded the MAE program to Princeton University in 2023, and, to sustain this expansion, we established an independent 501c3 organization, called Making an Exoneree Project, Inc. The MAE staff collaborates to carefully narrow down the list of potential cases and provide comprehensive guidance and support to students throughout the spring semester.

This course model now operates at four universities: Georgetown University (since 2018), Princeton University (since 2023), New York University (since 2025), and the University of California at Santa Cruz (since 2025), all of which are partly supported by a practicum course at Georgetown University Law Center. Overall, the MAE program has helped gain freedom for 12 wrongfully convicted individuals. Our organization works tirelessly to pursue freedom and justice for the wrongfully convicted, while engaging young, passionate students in real-world advocacy.

This past Spring 2025 semester, students at the four schools were able to reinvestigate 16 cases of likely wrongful conviction. All together, these 16 individuals have spent 420 years and counting behind bars for crimes they did not commit. Thanks to zealous student reinvestigation, pro bono support from leading experts in the criminal legal field, and experienced professors and lawyers assisting our program, Making an Exoneree has become a life-affirming and life-altering course for everyone involved. In the eight years since inception, we have developed a model that allows us to replicate and expand the program to more universities across the country, and we look forward to continuing our expansion and helping wrongfully convicted people achieve their much-deserved and long-awaited freedom.

Who better to fight for your right to discovery than the person who helped write the statute?

Steven Epstein, one of the founding partners at Barket Epstein has defended DWI cases almost exclusively for 33 years. He helped write the law as it relates to what discovery has to be turned over by the prosecution in a DWI case.

Our team has won three motions to dismiss for speedy trial violations in the last three months. With this area of the law changing daily, we stay up to date on court decisions and the law in each county so we can be ready to do the best job possible when writing our client's motions and winning them.

These dismissals result in saving our client’s licenses, ensuring their freedom and saving their jobs. For one client in particular, first we were able to obtain a hardship license so he would be able to drive to and from work while the case was pending. Then, we were able to secure a dismissal on his refusal hearing, preventing his license from being suspended for a year. Lastly, we secured a dismissal of his criminal case because of a motion we filed which the judge found the People were not actually ready for trial within the statutory ninety-day period.

Results like these require experience and knowledge by lawyers who defend these charges. Others may promise to do all they can, at Barket Epstein, we do all that can be done.

On April 11, 2025, our Partner, John LoTurco, secured a dismissal on behalf of our client who was charged with Driving While Intoxicated. The Honorable Mary Kate Mullen of the Suffolk County District Court granted our application for dismissal, and the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office joined our application. Our client was charged with Driving While Intoxicated on August 5, 2023 following two separate car accidents, one involving personal injury to several passengers, and the other was property damage at the arrest scene. Our client vigorously denied that he was operating his landscaping company’s work truck, despite two eyewitnesses falsely identifying him at the scene as the operator of his landscaping truck. John LoTurco, with the invaluable assistance of his trusted paralegal, Gina Zamora, conducted a comprehensive investigation which including taking affidavits from numerous witnesses that supported our client’s claim that his employee was the actual driver of the landscaping truck. Our law firm presented an extensive written submission to the District Attorney’s Office, which included surveillance footage showing our client as a passenger in his friend’s vehicle, who was heading in the same direction as our client’s employee after a night of having numerous drinks at a local restaurant. The surveillance footage showed our client leaving the restaurant and entering his friend’s vehicle, and the employee entering the landscaping truck. Our client asserted that the reason he was not driving his own truck was because he was indeed intoxicated. Our submission to the District Attorney’s Office also included our client passing a polygraph exam.

Despite the compelling evidence, the District Attorney was initially unwilling to dismiss the charges, as they were relying on the two eyewitnesses identifications at the scene. The District Attorney argued that our surveillance footage was approximately 15 minutes before the accident, which left time for our client to switch vehicles and operate his landscaping truck. We successfully rebutted that after our client’s employee fled the scene on foot, our client shortly thereafter pulled up to the accident scene, exited his friend's vehicle, and was inspecting his landscaping truck when the eyewitnesses from the first accident arrived at the second accident scene, and falsely identified our client as the driver. As a result of the District Attorney’s initial unwillingness to dismiss the charges, the case was scheduled for trial. However, after the District Attorney’s Office’s Supervisors carefully reviewed the evidence, they consented to the dismissal. The dismissal was critical as our client avoided potential collateral deportation proceedings.

Alexander Klein received a favorable decision in a commercial case the firm litigated in Nassau County. The firm represented a dentist who was duped into buying machinery he didn’t need on credit, defaulted, and then got sued for a large unpaid bill. The lender sued under a provision of New York law allowing for hyper-expedited summary judgment proceedings, and we opposed and filed a cross-motion seeking to dismiss.

That motion was granted, agreeing that the plaintiff’s paperwork demonstrated that it lacked standing to prosecute the action.

See attached decision and motions:

Decision

Memorandum of Law in Opposition

Reply Memorandum

To secure a DWI arrest and prosecution of a local motorist named Kevin Goodman, Detective Sherman Payami fabricated a wide variety of evidence that he claimed would support the establishment of probable cause in criminal court. For his misconduct, Detective Payami became the subject of an internal investigation inside the Nassau County District Attorney’s Office, which decided to make Giglio disclosures on all of Payami’s open cases in light of the credibility-damage that emerged from the ashes of the Goodman-prosecution. And Payami became the target of a damning review from the criminal court judge, too, who attributed Mr. Goodman’s arrest to the type of “dishonesty” that “doesn’t [come to light] very often.”

The detective’s fabrications ranged from the basis for stopping Mr. Goodman, to Mr. Goodman’s appearance upon being stopped, to Mr. Goodman’s performance on roadside tests—all of which came together to form a twenty-month odyssey in criminal court before the fabrications in his notes, records and testimony came to light through video evidence that conclusively demonstrated the dramatic falsity of the officer’s reports and led to the dismissal of all charges.

Led by Bruce Barket and Alexander Klein, the firm brought civil rights claims on Mr. Goodman’s behalf in federal court, where it fought for justice on his behalf for nearly half a decade. During that time, BEKAL won a series of critical sets of motion practice—including records it obtained from Nassau County over the County’s staunch objection, and which ultimately proved critical in highlighting the extent of the officer’s misconduct; and summary judgment practice, where BEKAL defeated two sets of motions—one by Payami and one by Nassau County—which had attempted to obtain dismissal of the case before trial.

The firm represents a doctor in Delaware who consulted and ultimately worked on the board of directors for a small publicly traded company who, in counsel’s view, had attempted to illegally avoid its payment obligations to the doctor. After years of litigation in the State of Delaware, including two trips by Alexander Klein to Delaware’s highest court for oral argument, on January 21, 2025 the Delaware Supreme Court decided that the Court of Chancery’s attempt to dismiss the case against the doctor was legally erroneous and that the matter should now proceed against the company on the merits, once and for all.

The details of the case concern the meaning of a contract between the company and the doctor, pursuant to which the parties agreed that the doctor had “no rights to any other options, equity awards or other securities of the Company,” but subject to a carveout preserving “securities of the Company, if any, issued to you on or prior to the date hereof, if any.” According to the allegations, BEKAL’s client had been granted approximately one million stock options by the Company—qualifying as “securities … issued … prior to the date hereof,” and yet the Company attempted to use the contract language as a springboard for eviscerating all prior options rights held by the doctor.

Through complex motion practice and oral argument, BEKAL cogently explained how the Company’s argument was erroneous and failed to live up to the required legal standards. “This case has required two make-or-break trips to the Delaware Supreme Court in the early stages,” Klein recounted. “But we will not be finished here until the Company does right by our client.”

For the decision click here.

For the oral argument click here.