Ron Kuby

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Ron Kuby : biography

31 July 1956 –

Ronald L. Kuby (born July 31, 1956) is an American criminal defense and civil rights lawyer, radio talk show host and TV commentator. He has hosted radio programs on WABC Radio in New York and Air America Radio.

Personal life

Kuby was born in Cleveland, Ohio.

After his parents divorced when he was five years old, Kuby lived with his mother. At thirteen, he joined the Jewish Defense League under the influence of his father, who was a follower of Meir David Kahane.

In junior high school, Kuby says he was nearly expelled for publishing an underground newspaper critical of the school administration. He left junior high school in ninth grade and emigrated to Israel in 1971. He became disenchanted with the anti-Arab racism he found there, and was deported five months later. He returned to Cleveland and lived in a commune for the next several years. He briefly attended an accredited alternative high school, graduating in 1973. He attended Cleveland State University for one year.

Kuby dropped out of college in 1974, and moved to St. Croix, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where he worked on a tugboat and developed an interest in West Indian ethnobotany and medicinal plants. He moved briefly to Maine, then to Kansas in 1975 where he completed his degrees in cultural anthropology and history at the University of Kansas. Kuby was a free-speech and anti-apartheid activist while at KU. Kuby graduated with highest distinction, had a 4.0 average, and conducted and published original fieldwork, including the 1979 "Folk medicine on St. Croix: an ethnobotanical study", after returning to St. Croix several times.

Kuby earned his Juris Doctor from Cornell Law School in 1983. His grades entitled him to a position on the prestigious Cornell Law Review but Kuby turned down the invitation. He graduated as one of the top students in his class.

In addition to providing legal counsel to David Hampton, a petty con artist who made headlines for his brazen claims, Kuby struck up a personal friendship with him that later continued.City Lights: Stories About New York, Dan Barry, pg 161

On January 23, 2006, Kuby married Marilyn Vasta, his life partner since 1986, remarking that the date was chosen because it was the 20th anniversary of their first date.

Notable cases

Kuby, with Kunstler, represented Gregory Lee Johnson, a protester who burned a U.S. Flag at the 1984 Republican National Convention; Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the blind cleric who headed the Egyptian-based militant group Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, accused of planning and encouraging terrorist attacks against Americans; Colin Ferguson, the man responsible for the 1993 LIRR shootings (who chose to represent himself at trial); Qubilah Shabazz, the daughter of Malcolm X, accused of plotting to murder Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam; Glenn Harris, a New York public school teacher who absconded with a fifteen year-old girl for two months; Darrell Cabey, a youth who was acquitted of assault on Bernard Goetz and successfully sued him for shooting Cabey; Yu Kikumura, a member of the Japanese Red Army; and associates of the Gambino Crime Family. During the Gulf War, they represented American soldiers claiming conscientious objector status. They also represented El Sayyid Nosair, assassin of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, whom Kuby’s father had admired.

After Kunstler’s death, Kuby continued the work of his late mentor. In 1996, he won a judgment of forty three million dollars for Darrell Cabey against Bernhard Goetz. He also won nearly a million dollars for members of the Hells Angels motorcycle club, who were wrongfully arrested by the New York City Police Department. He won the 2001 release of two men imprisoned 13 years for a murder they did not commit, winning a judgment of 3.3 million dollars for the pair. He secured a reversal of a murder conviction for a mentally ill homeless man whose candle accidentally caused the death of a firefighter. In 2005, Kuby won close to a million dollars for another wrongfully convicted man who spent eight years in prison.