The Forest Hills woman convicted of hiring a relative to shoot her husband after a custody dispute was denied an appeal last week by the New York State Supreme Court.
The court upheld Mazoltuv Borukhova’s 2009 conviction of first-degree murder and second-degree conspiracy and her life sentence
without parole.
Investigators said Borukhova paid her uncle by marriage Mikhail Mallayev $20,000 to carry out the hit in 2007. He committed the murder in front of the couple’s 4-year-old daughter at Annadale Playground in broad daylight as Borukhova was meeting her husband, Dr. Daniel Malakov.
Borukhova, 37, had hired former O.J. Simpson attorney Alan Dershowitz to represent her in the appeal. They argued that some statements she made to police should have been thrown out because they violated attorney client privilege and that the prosecution had two extra days to prepare closing statements. She also claimed that the evidence leading to her conviction was only circumstantial.
“…The record does not support the defendant’s claim that she was deprived of a fair trial, and deprived of the effective assistance of counsel, because her attorney was required to deliver his summation without adequate preparation time,” the judgment reads.
A key point in the case came when eyewitnesses including a city school teacher identified Mallayev as the man who shot Malakov point-blank in the chest using a gun equipped with a home-made silencer.
Prosecutors said Borukhova had hired Mallayev as revenge after he won custody of their daughter. She denied knowing him, but investigators showed she made 91 calls to him and paid him $20,000 in cash in the days leading up to the shooting in October.
“This was a terribly sad case.…,” Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said in a statement. “The Appellate Division’s unanimous affirmance of the jury’s verdict and the trial court’s sentence of incarceration will hopefully bring a measure of closure to Dr. Malakov’s family.”
By Jeremiah Dobruck
