Dan Herbeck

1 week ago | buffalonews.com | Dan Herbeck

In Erie County, about nine out of every 10 people charged with crimes are represented by defense attorneys paid for by taxpayers. County officials were outraged when they learned that some attorneys – working as private contractors – were paid $400,000 to $500,000 last year to represent people who said they could not afford to hire their own lawyers. Now, the county is preparing to move many of those cases to a nonprofit agency, the Buffalo Legal Aid Bureau.

2 weeks ago | buffalonews.com | Dan Herbeck

Patrick Raycraft came to downtown Buffalo on Friday to say a giant “thank you” to the people who saved his life last October. Raycraft, 63, is a photojournalist and journalism teacher from Connecticut whose life was saved by doctors, nurses and other emergency medical personnel Oct. 5. He suffered a massive heart attack while riding his bicycle in a fundraising event to benefit the Erie Cattaraugus Rail Trail bike path project.

3 weeks ago | buffalonews.com | Dan Herbeck |Sandra Tan

A federal trial is taking a jury back almost 50 years, to a cold winter night when five Buffalo teenagers became the prime suspects in the robbery and murder of a Buffalo man. Accusations of the wrongdoing by Buffalo Police in the arrest and imprisonment of John H. Walker Jr. and Darryl A. Boyd have already cost Buffalo taxpayers $8.7 million.

3 weeks ago | buffalonews.com | Dan Herbeck

For more than four decades, Herbert L. Greenman represented accused drug kingpins; con artists and fraudsters who stole millions; crooked politicians, business people and cops. Greenman was one of Buffalo’s most high-profile defense lawyers. Now at age 78, he’s made a major career move, taking over an office that defends thousands of people who cannot afford to hire attorneys. After a leadership shakeup in the office, Greenman on March 1 became Niagara County’s chief public defender.

1 month ago | buffalonews.com | Dan Herbeck

When a nervous and shell-shocked Rubens Mukunzi arrived in the United States 13 years ago, the last thing he wanted was any kind of trouble with the law. Mukunzi grew up in the African nation of Rwanda. As a teenager during the 1990s, he watched family members and close friends die during a genocide that took an estimated 800,000 to 1 million lives.