NEW YORK (1010 WINS) — The New York City Council held a hearing on Tuesday to investigate the Department of Correction’s failure to bring incarcerated defendants to their court dates.
Between January and March 2023, about 15% of New York City prisoners scheduled to appear in court never made it to the courthouse, according to data provided to the Council by the DOC.
Paul Schechtman, general counsel for the DOC, testified that the department had a significant improvement in the rate at which defendants were produced for their court date in May, with only about 4% absent.
Of 6,293 court appearances scheduled in May, 146 missed dates were attributed to non-compliance, 35 were due to medical problems, 20 for religious observance, and 27 were categorized as “other.”
Carlina Rivera, the chair of the Council’s Committee on Criminal Justice, told 1010 WINS statistics from a single good month fail to capture the scope of the problem.
“We really want to get to the bottom of the DOC’s number. The number that they repeated a couple times during the hearing, 96% [appearance rate], that was really just reflected in one good month, at most two” she said. “Having a couple of good months is a step in the right direction. Clearly we want those numbers to increase to get as close to 100 as possible, but we also have to make sure that the other numbers that we’re seeing, and then the stories we’re hearing from people who are currently detained and incarcerated, from public defenders who go to Rikers on a regular basis… It’s very different.”
There’s also evidence that many of the defendants accused of non-compliance by the DOC deny they refused to show up to their court date.
Rivera cited a survey from New York County Defender Services that found 58% of attorneys said their client disputed the DOC claim that they refused to go to court at least one time in the past two months.
The councilmember introduced legislation on Tuesday that aims to ensure lawyers and judges have proof as to whether a court date was missed due to non-compliance or DOC incompetence.
The bill would require the DOC record audio and video of each refusal to attend a court appearance. The video would then be uploaded to a database accessible to attorneys and judges.
When 1010 WINS requested comment on the hearing and the new legislation, a DOC spokesperson referred to Schactman’s testimony.
“The Department and the Office of Court Administration coordinate closely to ensure that all individuals in the Department’s custody who are scheduled for a court appearance, appear,” said the DOC’s general counsel at the hearing Tuesday. “The good news is that court production has improved significantly. Recently, it has not been our strong suit, but this is no longer the case.”
The stakes are high for defendants, many of whom are incarcerated on Rikers Island. The notorious prison was the subject of another scathing report last week from a federal monitor appointed to oversee New York City prisons.
The dispatch warned of an “imminent risk of harm” to inmates and described an environment plagued by violence between prisoners, abuse by guards and medical neglect.
“We know that missed court dates drag out the legal process and keep people in jail longer,” said Rivera. “If you miss one court date, there’s a chance that you are spending, at minimum, weeks if not months longer on Rikers Island, and that can continue over and over and over again.”
The councilmember said that 16% of defendants released pretrial in 2019 failed to appear for a court date and compared the statistic to the 15% who missed a trial between January and March 2023.
“They have a tremendous budget — larger than any municipality really in the country,” she said. “If the Department of Correction is having issues with staffing shortages, with transportation itself, we want to know. So we’ve asked these questions of them to figure out how we can get the percentage to something that is acceptable. It just simply is not right now.”
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