Syrie Fried

Syrie Fried has been a criminal defense trial and appellate lawyer for more than 30 years. She is a member of the Massachusetts, Florida, and District of Columbia bars. She has won jury acquittals in many serious criminal cases including murder, rape, burglary, robbery, drug distribution, and gun possession, as well as white collar cases for clients charged with mail and wire fraud and conspiracy. She is a seasoned trial lawyer and has tried more than two dozen felony cases to verdict, her most recent trial being an aggravated rape case that resulted in an acquittal. Before going into private practice, Ms. Fried was a public defender in Miami, Boston, and Washington, D.C. and spent more than 10 years as a federal public defender. She has represented dozens of clients charged with white collar crimes including counterfeiting, forgery, theft of government property, tampering with consumer products, bank fraud, and securities fraud. In her work as an appellate lawyer, Ms. Fried has succeeded in challenging federal sentences involving sentencing guidelines disputes and in reversing convictions for conspiracy and attempted robbery. In a precedent-setting case, Ms. Fried challenged her client’s 15-year mandatory minimum sentence under the federal Armed Career Criminal Act, arguing that her client’s Massachusetts state court convictions for assault and battery were not categorically violent felonies for purposes of the Act’s sentencing enhancement provisions. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit agreed with this argument and vacated the client’s sentence. She has won appeals in Massachusetts, New York, and the District of Columbia.

Member

Ms. Fried has been a member of the Boston Bar Association’s Criminal Law Section, which she joined in 2012. In her work on that body she organized and moderated a public forum on the changes in the marijuana laws in the Commonwealth in 2014. She also worked on a subcommittee that formulated recommendations on behalf of the Bar Association to the legislature on revisions to the state’s gun laws in the aftermath of Sandy Hook. Ms. Fried was also a clinical instructor at the Harvard Law School Criminal Justice Institute working under Professor Charles Ogletree for more than four years. She taught fundamentals of trial practice, supervised law students who represented adults and juveniles in the Massachusetts courts, wrote and argued appeals in cases the Institute took on as pro bono projects, team-taught the Institute’s 3rd-year criminal justice seminar, and designed and taught a juvenile practice seminar.