Prior to becoming Legal Director for Centurion in October 2014, Paul Casteleiro was a sole practitioner with law offices in Hoboken, New Jersey. His specialty was criminal trial and appellate work. Early on in his private practice, Jim McCloskey retained Casteleiro to represent Chiefy De Los Santos, who became Centurion’s first client and exonoree. With that case, Casteleiro began his 35-year relationship with Centurion. Since then his collaboration with Jim McCloskey, and Kate Germond, Centurion’s Executive Director, has resulted in freeing wrongly convicted and imprisoned individuals. As a private practitioner he also was able to free several private, non-Centurion clients, who were wrongly convicted.
As a law student at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey Casteleiro clerked for Morton Stavis, one of the founders of the Center for Constitutional Rights. His work with Stavis led to an assignment on the Chicago 8 retrial. Upon his graduation from Rutgers, Casteleiro spent three years as a trial attorney with Office of the Public Defender in Jersey City, New Jersey.
His noteworthy achievements include: passage of a statute in New Jersey to compensate persons mistakenly imprisoned, N.J..S. 52:4C-3 et seq.; overturning the Supreme Court of New Jersey’s seminal ruling in State v Hurd, 86 N.J. 182 (1981) resulting in the banning hypnotically enhanced testimony in criminal trials, State v Moore, 188 N.J. 182 (2006); developing evidence establishing the unreliability of the F.B.I.’s bullet lead composition analysis leading the FBI to disband the unit offering such testimony, State v Behn, 375 N.J. Super 409 (App. Div. 2005); obtaining for the first time in New York State history a published ruling admitting expert testimony on the psychology of police interrogations and false confessions, People v Kogut, 10 Misc.3d 305 (Sup. Nassau Cty., 2005); the acquittal of two Centurion clients in the retrial of their murder cases, James Landano in New Jersey in 1998 and John Kogut in New York in 2005; the exoneration of Richard Lapointe, a developmentally disabled man who was coerced into confessing to a murder he did not commit, Lapointe v Commissioner, 316 Conn. 225 (2015); and the granting of a federal writ of habeas corpus and a new trial in the Florida State court for Jules Letemps, after 26 years of incarceration, ___ F. Supp.3d ___; 2015 WL 4429244 (M.D. Fla. 2015).
Casteleiro is admitted to the New Jersey and New York Bars, as well as, the Bars of Supreme Court of the United States, the United States Courts of Appeal for the Second, Third and Eleventh Circuits and Federal District Courts in New Jersey and the Southern and Eastern Districts in New York.
