Eric Soehnlein of the Buffalo-based Soehnlein Law PLLC represented defendant Peter Gerace Jr. in connection with criminal charges arising from a 2021 second superseding indictment. After being charged in a separate March 2023 indictment, he was ordered detained pending trial. The government’s instant motion to disqualify Soehnlein implicates the Sixth Amendment’s right to effective assistance of counsel.
“As weighty as those issues are, there is far more at stake in this motion and in this case,” U.S. District Judge Lawrence Vilardo of the Western District of New York wrote in a ruling in which he said addresses a matter of first impression. “In fact, it is not hyperbole to say that the rights of all defendants in this District and beyond to the effective assistance of counsel—and by extension this Court’s obligation to preserve the fairness of its criminal proceedings—are at issue here.”
