Stanley Cohen has made a career out of defending rights activists, people living on the margins of society and clients many Americans believe don't even deserve due process, including Osama bin Laden’s son in law, Sulaiman Abu Ghaith. Cohen is known as the "Hamas attorney" because he has since 1995 represented the party (but not its military arm), which the U.S. has designated a terrorist organization. He is also one of the most controversial firebrand attorneys in the U.S., and he is about to be imprisoned for the relatively pedestrian though certainly serious crime of obstructing and impeding the administration of tax laws and failing to report $3 million in income. The charges, which have sometimes been misreported as tax evasion, are connected to his not filing taxes with the Internal Revenue Service from 2005 to 2010, failing to keep records and not reporting large cash payments. In his April plea hearing, Cohen stated that “the government failed to note … in each of those years extensions were filed, gross suggested revenues, gross suggested expenses and some payments were made.” Due to report to prison on Jan. 6 to serve an 18-month sentence, he spent the holidays packing up his office in New York City's Lower East Side while sipping white wine and listening to Judy Garland. Cohen, 63, who has published his views on the case on his website, describes the case against him as "crap," saying that he pleaded guilty only to "dispose of the case".

Cohen said he has endured "15 years of nonstop harassment" of him and his clients, friends and family and owes hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees — money he does not have. Facing the prospect of spending five more years in litigation, he "just decided to end it," he said, sounding not at all contrite. From the start, he has described the case against him as a politically motivated "witch hunt," adding that he has been indicted on rare charges. "Impeding the IRS — I dare you to find someone else who has been prosecuted for that," said Cohen. New York Executive Assistant U.S. Attorney John Duncan, who co-represented the government’s case against Cohen in the Northern District of New York, could not say how many cases of obstructing and impeding the IRS have been successfully prosecuted. "We have had other cases where prosecutions have occurred under that statute," said Duncan, conceding that other tax-related charges are "prosecuted more frequently."

A political target?