Prominent med mal attorney Stephen Snyder avoids prison for attempted extortion

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Stephen Snyder will not go to prison.

Snyder, the prominent medical malpractice lawyer, was sentenced Wednesday to three years of probation with six months of home confinement for attempting to extort the University of Maryland Medical System out of $25 million.

U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman cited Snyder’s rapidly declining physical health and cognitive ability in giving him a sentence with no prison time. She said a prison sentence was not necessary to deter him or other attorneys from committing similar crimes.

“I do not believe Mr. Snyder is a danger to the public,” she said. “Prison is not always necessary to meet these goals.”

Snyder, whose law license is suspended, spoke after his daughter, one of his ex-wives, a lifelong friend and a former personal security officer offered character statements.

He apologized to Boardman for violating her repeated orders to follow the rules of evidence, and he acknowledged that representing himself was a mistake. He also apologized personally to Sue Kinter, a lawyer who was promoted last month to president and CEO of the Maryland Medicine Comprehensive Insurance Program, the captive insurance provider for UMMS. Kinter was among those he threatened.

“I was my own worst enemy,” he said. “I didn’t have bad intent.”

“I beg you not to send me to jail,” he said.

At the hearing, Snyder and his lawyer, Justin Brown, acknowledged that he had received a working diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. He said he would be unable to follow his medical regimen if he were sent to prison. After reading his pre-sentencing report compiled by Brown, Snyder said, “I cried like a baby, because I never realized how sick I was.”

Snyder, who is widely known for his slogan — “Don’t just sue them, Snyder them” — was convicted in November of one count of Hobbs Act attempted extortion and seven Travel Act counts.

Prosecutors asked for a three-year sentence, with three years of supervised release, a $100,000 fine and a $100 special assessment for each of the eight counts. Boardman declined to assess the $100,000 fine, but did impose the special assessments.

Snyder, who turns 78 years old next month, asked not to be incarcerated due to his “declining health and cognitive impairment,” according to a sentencing memorandum that was filed last week and unsealed with redactions on Tuesday.

“If he were sent to the Bureau of Prisons, there is no doubt that he would not receive the care he needs,”  Brown wrote. “This is a sad statement about the BOP, but it is true. To send Snyder to prison with this knowledge would be to punish him more excessively than he deserves.”

“He’s confused, disoriented and, I’m going to say — he gets worse by the week,” Brown said Wednesday.

Brown said he would appeal.

In 2018, Snyder threatened a media smear campaign about the UMMS transplant division — against which he had brought numerous cases over the years, winning multiple seven-figure settlements — if the hospital didn’t agree to hire him as a consultant for $25 million. If they paid him, he said, he would keep quiet about what he described as the division’s prioritization of profits over patients, and he would be conflicted out of future malpractice cases against it.

Snyder never moved forward with the smear campaign after UMMS settled the case for $5 million and did not agree to the consultancy.

Snyder argued that he was negotiating aggressively and that there was a nexus between the proposed consultancy and his representation of a woman whose husband died after a kidney transplant. Evidence showed that he did not express interest in reforming the alleged fraud in the transplant division in order to prevent bad patient outcomes. Prosecutors described the agreement as a “sham” and a “shake-down” fueled by greed.

RELATED: Judge rejects med mal lawyer Stephen Snyder’s motion for acquittal or new trial

Snyder represented himself from December 2023 through the trial. The risk did not pay off.

Boardman reprimanded him repeatedly throughout the trial for his unwillingness or inability to conduct himself with decorum, to ask relevant questions of witnesses, and to insert his own testimony into his questioning.

A fact Snyder repeatedly mentioned — despite Boardman’s orders — was the initial decision by federal law enforcement not to prosecute him. He was indicted in 2020, two years after he sought the agreement.

After arguments closed and the jury left the courthouse on Nov. 21, Boardman held him in contempt of court and ordered him to spend the night in prison. As he was escorted out by U.S. Marshals, he joked to those in attendance that he was going on a “vacation.” The next morning, the jury deliberated for about three hours and found him guilty on all counts.

“The Court did its level best to navigate the extremely challenging circumstances,” Boardman wrote in a March 28 opinion.

“Throughout the presentation of the evidence, Snyder struggled to double as a criminal defendant and a criminal defense attorney,” she wrote. “Wearing both hats under any circumstances would be difficult. For Snyder, it was an extraordinary challenge. Question after question, witness after witness, and day after day, Snyder had trouble formulating questions that complied with the Federal Rules of Evidence.”

At one point, she limited the time Snyder had to question witnesses, a change that kept him more in line.

“As it turned out, Snyder knew how to ask appropriate questions all along,” she wrote.

After the conviction, Snyder filed a motion for acquittal or a new trial and asked to interview jurors about whether they had seen media coverage of the trial in the last three days of trial. He argued that he was not competent to stand trial or to waive his right to an attorney, but he soon abandoned that argument.

Boardman denied both motions, writing in a March 28 opinion, “there is sufficient evidence to sustain Snyder’s convictions and a new trial is not in the interest of justice.”

In a letter to Boardman asking for as lenient a sentence as possible, one of his sons, Scott Snyder, said family and friends advised him against representing himself. He wrote that his prior attorneys, from the firm Rifkin Weiner Livingston, dropped him as a client when he could no longer afford to pay for his defense after spending millions.

“It was extremely difficult to watch this trial,” Scott Snyder wrote. “This was a man who was a shell of his former self. He couldn’t remember names, he couldn’t use technology, he couldn’t ask simple questions.”

“Every time you mentioned he shouldn’t represent himself I was praying that you would just rule that he could not,” he continued. “He sits in his house all day everyday in his recliner. His own prison. He should have never in a million years represented himself. Everyone told him he was crazy to do it.”

This story has been updated.