Goshen attorney Amir Sadaghiani said he is running for Orange County Legislature to better his home county with insights and skills gained from nearly 20 years in law practice.
“I really want to focus on our mental health and substance abuse issues—it just goes back to my criminal justice background—and I really want to see more accountability from the county government,” Sadaghiani told The Epoch Times in an interview on March 10.
“Being a trial lawyer is about advocating and being able to persuade,” he said. “That gives me a unique skill set to advocate for [the] people of District 2 and for everyone in Orange County.”
The newly drawn District 2 encompasses the entire town of Goshen and the northern part of Warwick, including the village of Florida.
Raised in the town of Deerpark and a graduate of the Port Jervis School District, Sadaghiani spoke fondly of the tight-knit community on the western edge of the county.
“They took my family in, really, when no one else would take us in,” he said, adding that in the 1980s, under the political climate following the Iran hostage crisis, his late Iranian father, a U.S.-trained physician, couldn’t find a job in the New York metropolitan area until he interviewed for an OB-GYN position at a small hospital in Port Jervis.
“I can’t say enough about the community: the values, the togetherness, and this sense of when your neighbors need help, it is your obligation and privilege to help them,” he said.
Sadaghiani went on to study economics and finance at Bucknell University, a liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, with his eyes set on Wall Street, but 9/11 shifted his life perspectives.
“There is nothing wrong with finance; it was just my own personal belief that I wanted my life to mean something else,” he said, adding that both his father and mother, a longtime local school board member, taught him and his sister to serve humanity and give back to the community.
Sadaghiani attended the University of Notre Dame Law School and returned to Orange County in late 2006 to work as an assistant district attorney. He prosecuted a wide range of criminal cases, including major crimes like murder, arson, and robbery. He responded to crime scenes as part of an on-call team and managed wiretap investigations for the office.
About eight years later, amid the divorce proceeding with his ex-wife, Sadaghiani contemplated a job change and joined the late Chester attorney Ben Ostrer in private practice.
“My role as a prosecutor was not to just send people to jail, but to seek true justice, such as when facts and evidence lead to mercy,” he said.
“My role now as a defense attorney is to advocate for my clients and make sure that they get a just outcome on the case—my view has always been for the just outcome.”
Half of his private practice, which moved from Chester to Goshen years ago, is devoted to criminal cases, with the rest being personal injury and other civil matters.
In launching his county legislature bid, Sadaghiani—after years of witnessing the sizable role that mental health and substance abuse play in crime—sets his top priority as finding solutions at the county level to address the underlying causes of these issues.
“You can’t solve them by throwing money at police officers, prosecutors, and jails,” he said. “The county government can take the lead in providing resources and access for people to take advantage of them [to overcome these issues].”
Sadaghiani also wants to enhance government accountability and transparency.
“When things don’t go exactly the way they should in government, we have an obligation to present to the public what happened and how we addressed it to ensure it doesn’t happen again,” he said.
“Mistakes do happen, and none of us are perfect in life,“ he continued. ”It’s the idea of how you deal with those mistakes and how you move forward.”
As an attorney, Sadaghiani said he has traveled to almost every corner of the county and been trained to be a good listener, as people often meet him at their worst.
“I believe members of the Legislature are there to represent all of us—it doesn’t matter if you are a Democrat, a Republican, or an Independent, the Legislature is there for all of us,” he said.
“If elected, I’ll meet and work with anybody for the betterment of Orange County.”
As a father, Sadaghiani co-parents with his ex-wife three middle school-aged children: Catherine, Darius Amir, and Anthony.
“I spoke with my ex-wife about running for the Legislature because it was going to be a major change to our family life,“ he said. ”And we came to the decision as an entire family that this is something that we want to do, that we can do, and that we can do well.”
