Early Life and Formation

Stanley Lewis Cohen, born in 1953 in Portchester, New York, grew up in a household shaped by New Deal-era Democratic politics. Although he attended Hebrew school and completed his bar mitzvah, Cohen has long described himself as non-religious, identifying with Judaism primarily as a tradition of solidarity with the marginalized rather than as a spiritual practice.

Cohen’s political awakening came during the anti-war movement of the late 1960s, while still in high school. After graduating from Long Island University, he volunteered with VISTA, the federal anti-poverty program established under President Lyndon Johnson. His assignment took him to the Winnebago, Omaha, and Santee Sioux reservations in Nebraska, where he helped establish a legal-services project for indigenous communities.

Following his VISTA service, Cohen worked as a community organizer in New York City, directed a drug rehabilitation program for homeless teenagers in Westchester County, and administered a federally funded anti-poverty agency. He earned his law degree from Pace University Law School in 1983.

Early Legal Career and Formative Cases

While still a law student in the early 1980s, Cohen began collaborating with attorney Lynne Stewart to defend far-left political defendants facing state prosecution in New York. One of their highest-profile cases involved the defense of Kathy Boudin, a member of the Weather Underground and the May 19 Communist Organization who participated in the deadly 1981 Brinks armored-car robbery. The professional and personal relationship between Cohen and Stewart endured for decades.

After completing his legal education, Cohen spent seven years with the Legal Aid Society in the Bronx, where he defended indigent clients facing serious criminal charges. He has characterized this work as representing “poor people, people of color” whom he believed the justice system was designed to disadvantage.

During this period, Cohen also became a protege of radical attorney William Kunstler. Together they represented Larry Davis, a defendant with a lengthy criminal history who had shot six New York City police officers. Cohen mounted a self-defense argument contending that Davis had acted against officers involved in a corrupt drug operation. Despite widespread skepticism about the claim, a Bronx jury acquitted Davis in 1986. Davis was later convicted in a separate case for killing a drug dealer and sentenced to 30 years to life.

Indigenous Rights and Revolutionary Movements

After leaving the Legal Aid Society for private practice, Cohen built a client roster that spanned a wide range of radical and revolutionary movements. His work with indigenous communities became a significant portion of his practice during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Cohen represented the Mohawk Warrior Society during multiple confrontations with government authorities, including a three-month armed standoff with law enforcement in Quebec, for which Canadian authorities charged him with seditious conspiracy. He also defended Mohawk warriors during an armed jurisdictional dispute in Akwesasne, a territory straddling the U.S.-Canadian border, and represented dozens of Mohawk members who were prosecuted for closing a state highway during a police standoff.

Beyond indigenous rights, Cohen’s early private practice included defending approximately 100 members of the War Resisters League, the Revolutionary Communist Party, and other activist groups arrested during protests against the first Gulf War. He represented members of the anarchist group Black Bloc at anti-corporate demonstrations, members of the Irish Republican Army, a Dublin-born priest who conspired to conceal stolen Brinks robbery proceeds, and members of the Peruvian Maoist organization known as the Shining Path.

Representing Defendants in Terrorism Cases

The aspect of Cohen’s legal career that generated the most attention and controversy was his sustained representation of defendants charged in terrorism-related cases. This body of work began in the 1990s when he joined Kunstler, Stewart, and former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark in defending Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the Islamic Group leader prosecuted for his involvement in several terror plots including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

From 1995 to 1997, Cohen represented Moussa Mohammed Abu Marzook, a senior Hamas political leader who co-founded the Islamic Association for Palestine and the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. Cohen worked to prevent Israel from extraditing Marzook from the United States, visiting his client in jail almost nightly for 22 months. Cohen ultimately succeeded in helping Marzook avoid the Israeli justice system, with Marzook eventually resettling in Syria. Cohen later referred to Marzook as “my dear friend” and compared him to Irish republican leader Gerry Adams.

Cohen’s terrorism-related defense work also included cases involving Albanian Muslim mercenaries heading to Kosovo, a Palestinian who attempted to firebomb a New York synagogue, an al-Qaeda-affiliated Texas imam, a Portland-based imam arrested for possessing trace explosives at an airport, a member of the Portland Seven terrorist cell, and Wadih el-Hage, who was convicted of conspiracy in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in East Africa. He also represented Hamas fundraisers and operatives, individuals accused of providing material support to al-Shabaab in Somalia, and a Hezbollah operative convicted of sending funds to the organization.

Views on American Policy and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Cohen has consistently characterized the United States as a nation with deeply embedded racial inequities in its criminal justice system. Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, he publicly questioned al-Qaeda’s responsibility and suggested that the government’s response would be used as a pretext to target critics of Israeli policy. He advised Muslims at a New Jersey mosque not to cooperate with FBI investigators, stating, “Just say no. It’s the safest way.”

Cohen drew explicit parallels between the post-9/11 treatment of Muslim communities and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, arguing that civil liberties in the United States have historically been applied along racial lines.

His criticism of Israel has been equally direct. Cohen has publicly described Israel as a “terrorist state” and has argued that what Israel does is “far more morally repugnant than what Hamas does.” He has asserted that Palestinians have both a right and an obligation to resist occupation “by any means necessary.” In 2002, he filed a federal lawsuit seeking to end U.S. financial support for Israel, naming President Bush, Secretary of State Powell, and Israeli Prime Minister Sharon among the defendants, and accusing them of genocide. Cohen was also a founding member of an international group of lawyers who filed war crimes suits against Israel in multiple countries and before the International Criminal Court.

Cohen has described himself as “among the few Jews in the United States capable of bridging the gap between the West and the militant politics of the Middle East,” noting meetings with Yasser Arafat and Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.

Later Cases and Legal Troubles

Cohen’s later work included representing a member of the hacker collective Anonymous who was prosecuted for participation in a 2010 digital protest against PayPal, and an activist charged with assaulting a police officer during the 2011 Occupy Wall Street demonstrations.

In 2012, Cohen defended journalist Mona Eltahawy, who was arrested for spray-painting over a poster in a New York City subway station produced by the American Freedom Defense Initiative. The poster read, “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.” Eltahawy was charged after also spray-painting a bystander who attempted to intervene. Cohen characterized her actions as an exercise in free speech.

Cohen’s own legal difficulties emerged in June 2012 when a federal grand jury in Syracuse indicted him for failing to file individual and corporate income tax returns from 2005 through 2010, and for structuring cash deposits to avoid IRS reporting requirements. According to court documents, Cohen received cash payments exceeding $10,000 from clients without filing required reports and made regular deposits in amounts below the reporting threshold.

In December 2013, a Manhattan federal court added charges of wire fraud and five additional counts of failure to file income-tax returns on more than $3 million in earnings. Prosecutors alleged that Cohen had clients pay in cash or wire payments directly to American Express to pay his credit card bills, thereby concealing the income.

Professional Affiliations

Throughout his career, Cohen maintained close ties to the National Lawyers Guild and the Center for Constitutional Rights, organizations aligned with his approach to legal practice as a form of political advocacy. He has been described by supporters as a dedicated “people’s lawyer” willing to defend the most unpopular defendants, and by critics as an enabler of violent extremism who crosses the line between legal representation and political solidarity with his clients.