Paul, Weiss Wins New Trial for Indigent Defendant Wrongly Convicted of Westchester Double Murder

On December 31, a Paul, Weiss team won a rarely-granted motion for a new trial for Selwyn Days, an indigent defendant wrongly convicted of the 1996 double murder of Archie Harris and Betty Ramcharan in Westchester County, New York. In granting the motion after seven days of evidentiary hearings, the Court found that Days was denied effective assistance of counsel when his attorney failed to investigate and present alibi evidence that placed Days in Goldsboro, North Carolina at the time of the murders.

The Paul, Weiss team included associates Billy Clareman, Nader Hasan and Jeanhee Hong, foreign lawyer Jennifer Downing, summer associates Katherine Hance, Matthew Makover and Marques Tracy, and paralegals David Kim and Diane Park. The team was supervised by Roberto Finzi. Selwyn Days is one of several clients represented by the firm as part of its affiliation with the Exoneration Initiative, a not-for-profit organization whose corporate and tax-exempt status were created with the support of partners Mark Underberg and Jeffrey Samuels, and associates Beatrix Bong and Ehab Farah in Paul, Weiss's Corporate and Tax Departments.