A 51-year-old man accused of surreptitiously filming women engaged in sex acts is trying to avoid jail time by taking his case directly to a top Manhattan criminal judge over the objection of the district attorney’s office.
Daniel McAvoy, of Manhattan, was charged with 29 felony counts of unlawful surveillance in 2022 after investigators seized a trove of cameras and videos of women disrobing or engaging in sexual activity. That included more than 150 DVDs recovered from the Binghamton-area home of his father, longtime Senior U.S. District Judge Thomas McAvoy, Gothamist previously reported.
Court records now show McAvoy’s attorneys are trying to get their client accepted into a program that would allow him to avoid jail time if he pleads guilty and commits to completing an extensive treatment plan. Without it, a guilty conviction could come with a possible jail sentence of up to four years in state prison.
The prosecutor and judge overseeing McAvoy’s case both objected to his attorneys’ request in November. But McAvoy’s legal team has been undeterred, bringing their case directly to Ellen Biben, the administrative judge of the criminal part of state Supreme Court in Manhattan, in an attempt to convince her to bypass the prosecutor and trial judge’s objections.
Biben worked with then-Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance’s office to launch the ATI court in 2019. The program is unique to Manhattan, and has been hailed as an innovative way to connect people to much-needed services — rather than simply incarcerate them — when they come into contact with the criminal justice system.
In most cases, however, a defendants’ case is only moved to the Felony Alternative to Incarceration (ATI) Court, as the program is known, with the consent of the prosecution. In McAvoy’s case, there’s an exception because his alleged crimes don’t carry a mandatory jail sentence.
“Even if the [prosecutor does] not consent to it, we can still make an application…
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