Upon graduating New York Law School in June 1991, Ms. Berliner began her legal career as an Assistant District Attorney in the office of Robert M. Morgenthau, the New York County District Attorney. She spent two years working in the Appeals Bureau, writing briefs and arguing them in the Appellate Division, First Department. She then spent another twelve years in the Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor. While in the Office of Special Narcotics, Ms. Berliner worked on long-term and short-term drug investigations, a lengthy wiretap case and hundreds of street-level drug sale and possession cases. During that time, Mr. Berliner tried approximately 50-60 cases to verdict and acquired extensive litigation skills and experience. 

Before leaving the Office of Special Narcotics, Ms. Berliner received a Certificate of Appreciation from the New York Police Department’s Detectives Endowment Association. 

Ms. Berliner left the District Attorney’s Office in 2005 to begin her own criminal defense practice. For more than ten years, she has provided vigorous criminal defense for men, women, and adolescents in New York City, and in Nassau and Suffolk Counties.

Ms. Berliner also represents victims of police brutality and official misconduct in Federal Court in the Eastern and Southern Districts of New York. In 2008, in the case of Colon v. City of New York, Detective Stephen Anderson and Detective Henry Tavarez, et al., Ms. Berliner exposed rampant misconduct within the NYPD’s Queens Narcotics unit. The case involved the two named detectives fabricating a drug sale and falsifying police reports against four completely innocent men; the entire evening was recorded on surveillance video from the bar in which this “sale” was alleged to have taken place. After convincing members of the Queens County District Attorney’s Office that the drug sale charges against her client were fabricated, the District Attorney dismissed all of the charges against Ms. Berliner’s client, his brother and two of their friends. The District Attorney then brought criminal charges against the two detectives, who pled guilty and are now convicted felons; one of them went to prison. The case also opened the doors to multiple other charges of police misconduct, both in criminal cases and civil rights lawsuits. 

Ms. Berliner is admitted to practice law in New York State as well as the federal courts in the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York.

Ms. Berliner has lectured on marijuana law for the Cannabis Career Institute. She is an active member of the New York State Bar Association, the Queens County Bar Association, The New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, the New York State Defenders Association, the National Police Accountability Project and the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) Legal Committee. 

Mr. Berliner received her B.A. Degree in Broadcast Journalism from New York University in 1981. She began her first career in journalism as a newscaster at a Connecticut radio station, and then became a political correspondent for a statewide radio network in Connecticut, covering the state legislature and other political stories of statewide interest, including gubernatorial and senatorial campaigns and elections. Ms. Berliner was also the news director and morning anchor at another Connecticut radio station. She then became the on-air talent and a scriptwriter for a nationally-syndicated ski report and beach report, aired on about 200 radio stations across the country. Before starting law school, Ms. Berliner did commercials and voice-over work in New York City.