Jay Leiderman, a California prosecutor known for his whistling and defense of political opponents, was pronounced dead at Ventura County on Thursday. He was 50 years old.
Labeled “Hacktivist Attorney” by Atlantic Ocean in 2012, Leiderman attracted worldwide attention for his pro-bono work for clients who have been accused of vandalizing website and government websites, including members of the Anonymous group.
Often it was not good.
Leiderman’s rogue customers had a difficult habit of openly admitting their accusations. One spent ten years evading police in several countries, providing regular interviews on the lam. (The client was captured in June.) However, their origins were attributed to a Queens-born lawyer, who had long since embraced apostate intelligence. When a city in California issued a decree that homelessness would be possible, the same customer dropped one page for an hour. When the FBI detected a 15-year computerized computer case, Leiderman encountered protests against unjust law; a demonstration, quickly realized, which was not destroyed.
Leiderman often deals with newspaper fraud cases, and appeals to people living during the Civil-Rights era. Disrupting work on lunch machines, he asserted, was no different from disrupting a group of visitors on a page. “It’s easy to say the protests are legal, I think,” he said. “And we need to clearly define legitimate protests.”
G / O Media can be sent
Leiderman, whose nine-year-old son, Lydon, died of a heart attack on Tuesday, his brother Craig said briefly. Ventura’s medical examiner said the exact cause of death could take months to confirm.
Before working with the robbers, Leiderman defended a Ventura man who had been arrested for drug trafficking, and his police cell phone was searched without permission. The California Supreme Court later heard the case but ruled in favor of the officer. The ruling prompted local lawmakers to step up their efforts to protect electronic media from unnecessary searches. Two years later, the US Supreme Court issued a controversy. In many of his comments, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that mobile phones are “a common and active part of everyday life” so that, as visitors to the Earth, “he may think he was an important part of human design.”
Deadhead and a fan of punk music, Leiderman successfully defended a number of people arrested on anti-drug laws. He once took customers who took their children to the police station when they found marijuana hidden in their house. And he won. He was a dangerous lawyer for marijuana patients especially for more than a decade, writing a book on the subject in 2011 in the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. In 2013, he teamed up with other defense lawyers to form the Whistleblower Defense League. At his inauguration, he accused the Department of Justice and the FBI of seeking to crack down on politicians with weapons of violence, torture, and terrorism.
“People are being arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned, for their search for truth,” he said.
In an article on his page, Leiderman defended lawyers who get bad rap for using unscrupulous clients, including those accused of heinous crimes. The culprit, he believes, is the great need for competent representatives. “I can only say that what comes next is my patriotism,” he said. “I will protect the accused because it is my duty as a lawyer, and as an American.”
Funerals, followed by burial, will take place Sunday, September 12, at Menorah Chapel at Robert Schoem in Paramus, NJ.
Update, 9:30 pm: This issue has been changed and triggers a death reported by a relative.