Former Northwell urologist Darius Paduch, convicted of sexually abusing patients, seeks new trial

Darius Paduch, the former Long Island urologist convicted in Manhattan federal court of molesting seven male patients earlier this month, deserves a new trial, his lawyers argue in recent court filings, because he should have been charged under a misdemeanor state statute, not a federal one.

“Dr. Paduch now faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years and likely far more as punishment,” defense lawyer Michael Baldassare wrote in his motion filed in federal court in Manhattan. “All this because, in order to trigger federal jurisdiction, the government introduced evidence that someone other than Dr. Paduch drove into New York from another state and sent an email/used a phone.”

A Manhattan federal court jury on May 8 convicted the doctor, who spent 15 years working at Weill-Cornell Medical Center and Northwell Health on Long Island, after hearing the testimony of several victims and medical experts in a two-week trial.

The doctor, 56, who specialized in Kleinfelter syndrome, a birth defect in which the patient has an extra X chromosome that causes impotence, was accused of luring young men, five of them minors, across state lines for treatment. Once they became his patients, according to testimony during the trial, he would groom them to lower their inhibitions and then touch them sexually in the hospital examining rooms.

“What the defendant did was not sexual medicine,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jun Xiang said during opening arguments at the trial. “It was sexual assault.”

A 25-year-old New Jersey man whom Paduch treated for erectile dysfunction testified the doctor masturbated him three times, starting when he was a minor.

The mother of a patient from Maryland said her son changed after he started seeing Paduch, becoming more withdrawn and unhappy.

Multiple lawsuits have been filed against the doctor, Weill-Cornell and Northwell by hundreds of former patients saying they too were molested. Paduch lived in North Bergen, New Jersey.

During the trial, Baldassare, the New Jersey-based defense lawyer for Paduch, characterized the criminal trial as a quest for money.

“What these former patients will say from the witness stand is exactly what they say in the lawsuits, for money,” he said during opening arguments.

Baldassare vowed to appeal the decision, but instead, on May 23, he asked the judge to set aside the verdict based on the fact that the doctor should have not been charged with a federal crime.

“Permitting this conviction to stand would be a manifest injustice,” he said in court papers.

Federal prosecutors opposed the bid for a new trial, saying the defense lawyer’s argument was not supported by case law.

“The defense’s due process claim appears to rest on the contention that federal statutes should not punish criminal conduct more severely than state statutes,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Marguerite Colson wrote in her response. “There is no support for that contention.”

The prosecutor added that trial evidence proved Paduch was guilty and the jury agreed.

“The defendant is an unrepentant sex predator who preyed on countless children, for years,” Colson wrote. “He was convicted following a trial that complied in all respects with the law and the dictates of due process.”

The doctor was convicted on six counts of inducement to travel to engage in unlawful sexual activity and five counts of inducing a minor to engage in sex. He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.

The defense lawyer's filing awaits a ruling by the judge on whether the motion can go forward or be denied.