Joel Sanders and family members head into court for his sentencing. (Photo: David Handschuh/ALM)

Former Dewey & LeBoeuf executive Joel Sanders is battling to have his criminal conviction overturned, filing a 180-page appellate brief arguing that prosecutors, his former defense lawyer and the trial judge all violated his rights to a fair trial and due process.

Sanders, the former chief financial officer at Dewey, was convicted, after a second trial, of conspiracy, scheme to defraud and securities fraud under the Martin Act. Sanders, who works at Greenspoon Marder, was sentenced in 2017 to a $1 million fine and 750 hours of community service with the threat of jail if he didn’t comply.

In Sanders’ Aug. 5 appellate brief, filed by his lawyers at DLA Piper, he assailed the witness testimony against him as unreliable. He went especially hard on testimony by Francis Canellas, the firm’s ex-director of finance, who took a plea deal and implicated Sanders in criminal acts, but wrote in an email to a former colleague after the trial that “there was never any criminal intent” and “no one was thinking they were breaking the law,” which Sanders deemed a recantation.

“The recantation directly contradicts Canellas’ testimony,” the appeal brief claims, “and leaves no doubt that he never believed either he or Sanders committed any crimes.”

Sanders was tried alongside Stephen DiCarmine, Dewey’s former executive director, who was acquitted. Sanders, in his appeal brief, assailed his former lawyers for not pushing for him to be tried separately from DiCarmine. He said it became clear at the first trial that DiCarmine was trying to shift blame to him.

“Sanders’ counsel provided ineffective assistance of counsel by failing to request that Sanders’ [second trial] be severed from DiCarmine’s,” he argued, “in order to ensure Sanders could receive a fair trial.”

Andrew Frisch, who represented Sanders during the first and second trial, didn’t immediately respond to a comment request on Friday.

Sanders also asked the Appellate Division, First Department, to reverse his conviction because prosecutors allegedly introduced evidence of conduct he had been acquitted of to secure his conviction. “Trial 2 was replete with erroneous trial court rulings and prosecutorial misconduct that virtually guaranteed Sanders’ conviction and denied him a fair trial in violation of his state and federal constitutional rights,” he argued.

The brief further attacked evidentiary decisions, the guilty verdict and Justice Robert Stolz’s refusal to throw it out. He said the court deprived him of his constitutional rights by allowing a second trial to proceed after he was cleared on key counts at the first one, by letting the jury hear misleading evidence, such as an email where he referred to “cook[ing] the books,” and by not throwing the conviction out after the Martin Act’s scope was limited in an appellate decision.

Sanders’ sentence of no jail time shocked observers, but he was briefly locked up a year later, with the court saying he failed to pay the fine despite having the resources to do so. Greenspoon Marder, where Sanders has worked as chief operating officer, paid the fine and got him released, his lawyer told Law.com.

It wasn’t immediately clear when the Manhattan District Attorney’s office would file its own brief in response. A spokesman for the office declined to comment.

Sanders is represented on appeal by Christopher Oprison and Jessica Masella of DLA Piper.