Freedom’s advocate

Spring 2016
Sarah Loomis Cave

Photo by Gerard Gaskin

Sarah Loomis Cave ’95

Sarah Loomis Cave ’95 and her two law colleagues had spent almost an entire day at Rikers Island last August, waiting for Ruddy Quezada to be released from prison after 24 years. They were accompanied by his brother and Quezada’s 24-year-old daughter. Although Cave and her team had a court order to release Quezada, it took “a lot of frantic phone calls and trying to get to the right person who could literally push the button to open the gate and let him out the door — which went all the way up to the deputy warden and the commissioner of corrections,” said Cave.

At 8 p.m., Quezada finally walked out and hugged his daughter, who grew up while he was in prison and had barely seen him during his incarceration. “To be there at his first moment of freedom was an amazing experience,” Cave said. “It catches me every time [I think about it].” The lawyers took iPhone pictures of Quezada with his family and then his brother handed him the phone to talk to his sister in the Dominican Republic. Quezada, who had never held a smartphone, was astonished by the technology.

In 1993, Quezada was sentenced to 25 years to life for a murder conviction. He had been appealing his case for more than two decades. At the request of the federal judge presiding over the case, Cave’s team took on the matter on a pro bono basis in 2010. It took five years for them to prove that Quezada was wrongfully convicted because the prosecution had concealed evidence. The Brooklyn district attorney’s office ultimately agreed to vacate the conviction and not retry Quezada.

As a partner at Hughes Hubbard & Reed in New York City, Cave concentrates on securities litigation, accountants’ liability, and bankruptcy litigation. She recently represented an accounting firm that had audited funds that were invested with Bernard Madoff. Her case was a couple of steps removed from the heart of the Madoff scandal, said Cave, but “it was basically a claim that my client was negligent in not discovering there was a problem [with those investments].”

Like the Quezada case, Cave takes a number of cases pro bono, many of which involve immigration. In 2014, she and her colleagues helped a male couple from Jamaica who had been persecuted for their sexuality receive asylum in the United States. “That was one of the first cases where a couple applied together based on their homosexuality,” she said. Cave has since worked on similar cases for people from Africa and other places where homosexuality is considered wrong, or even criminal.

Cave just wrapped up a case in which she and her team helped a woman from The Gambia who had been subjected to female genital mutilation obtain asylum in the United States. This was one of several mutilation cases she’s taken in which the women were afraid to be sent back to their countries. Her firm also partners with the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project, helping individuals from Iraq or Syria who have applied for asylum.

Reflecting on the circumstances of the Quezada case and her other pro bono clients, Cave said: “We don’t realize how lucky we are. We can’t even begin to know what people have had to endure.”

— Aleta Mayne