Dora L. Irizarry

Judge Irizarry can be tough on lawyers, rightly or wrongly, which can make it difficult in front of your client. It does not matter. However, she is thorough, she reads everything and knows the material. She understands life experiences and that defendants are human beings who have made mistakes but are redeemable and decent. She gets it

Let me give you another side to Judge Irizarry. We had a client on a Violation of Supervised Release for using drugs. He was a drug user. During the numerous court appearances he was busted for NYC offenses at least twice -- for a distributable quantity of crack and for other offenses. Nonetheless he managed to hold down a full time job. She could have put him in for any of a number of reasons, but continued to work with him, over a period of several months and numerous court appearances, giving him encouragement. Eventually he entered a court-ordered drug program, and started getting more "clean" drug tests than dirty ones. Eventually the government, probation and defense counsel proposed a plea that called for no additional time. She not only went along with the proposal but cut him free from another six years' supervised release after observing he'd be on NYC probation from one of his iocal cases and that supervision in two jurisdictions was unnecessary. It would have been easy to simply remand him for his NYC cases or dirty tests but she didn't. In many other courts it could have turned out quite differently.