Withheld evidence would not have changed LI urologist Darius Paduch's guilty verdict, federal prosecutors argue

Manhattan federal prosecutors pushed back against convicted sex offender Darius Paduch’s second attempt to void his conviction, arguing that any evidence withheld from him at trial would not have led to his acquittal.

A jury convicted Paduch, 57, a former Northwell Health Great Neck and Lake Success urologist, on May 9 of six counts of inducement to travel to engage in unlawful sexual activity and five counts of inducing a minor to engage in sex.

Paduch, who specialized in treating a genetic fertility disorder called Klinefelter syndrome, encouraged and assisted patients, some underage, to masturbate in front of him for no medical purpose, according to trial testimony. Prosecutors presented evidence of six victims, but hundreds of civil suits have been filed against Paduch, Northwell and Weill Cornell Medicine alleging similar sexual abuse.

Defense lawyer Michael Baldassare has attempted to overturn his client's conviction twice. Judge Ronnie Abrams rejected a bid in August claiming that prosecutors had charged the wrong crimes.

With the Nov. 20 sentencing date closing in, Baldassare again last week sought to set aside the jury’s verdict.

This time the lawyer said that his client had been "robbed" of a fair trial because the Metropolitan Detention Center, the troubled federal jail currently holding the former doctor, had failed to deliver a hard drive full of evidence ahead of the trial.

"Dr. Paduch was robbed of the opportunity to participate in his own defense in this matter," Baldassare wrote. The hard drive contained emails, texts and medical records from victims and their parents who would go on to testify at trial, according to all parties.

The jail, known as the M.D.C., which houses Sean "Diddy" Combs and Samuel Bankman-Fried, has been the focus of the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General, which filed scathing reports on the violence and maintenance problems in the facility.

On Monday, federal investigators raided the jail as part of an effort "designed to achieve our shared goal of maintaining a safe environment for both our employees and the incarcerated individuals housed at M.D.C. Brooklyn," according to Randilee Giamusso, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons.

Baldassare said that the dysfunction at the jail prevented his client from reviewing the information before it was presented at trial by prosecutors. If he had, the lawyer argued, the disgraced urologist may have taken the stand in his defense.

"Dr. Paduch’s testimony — had he been able to make a fulsome evaluation of the information on the Concealed Hard Drive — would likely have resulted in an acquittal," Baldassare wrote in his motion.

Federal prosecutor Jun Xiang did not refute that the hard drive had not been turned over but said that Paduch’s lawyers did not protest that fact then and were aware of all the evidence before the trial began.

"The defendant cannot show how the alleged failure of the MDC to provide him the materials caused him any prejudice, much less the likelihood of acquittal," Xiang said in his brief. In fact, the evidence wouldn’t have helped him at all, he said.

"Put simply, the materials were damning pieces of evidence in a trial in which the government’s case was overwhelming," the prosecutor said.

Paduch was a resident of North Bergen, New Jersey.