NEW YORK (1010 WINS) — New York City Department of Correction Commissioner Louis Molina sought the release of a dying inmate as the department faced mounting scrutiny for the high rate of deaths and mismanagement at Rikers Island, The New York Times reported.
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The Times obtained an email Molina sent Thursday encouraging department officials to ensure Elmore Robert Pondexter, 59, was “off the Department’s count.”
Hours after the email went out, Pondexter was granted a “compassionate release” and then taken off of life support at Bellevue Hospital.
Because of his release, the DOC didn’t count him as having died in custody, didn’t notify the Board of Correction oversight panel and did not issue a press release, which is standard procedure for deaths in New York City prisons.
Pondexter was the 16th person to die at Rikers or shortly after being released from the notorious prison this year — the same amount as died in custody or shortly after release in all of 2021.
A DOC spokesperson told the Times the release was designed to give Pondexter’s family greater access before his death and denied any attempt at a cover-up.
“Let’s be clear — the department strongly supports compassionate release only because it allows for family members to spend time with the individual when they need the most care and support, and never to influence departmental statistics,” said the spokesperson. “The language used by Commissioner Molina in that email is technical in nature — removing someone off the department’s ‘count’ allows for them to spend time with their family with maximum privacy.”
Four city officials who spoke anonymously to the Times said they all read the language in the email as an attempt to remove Pondexter from the count of deaths at Rikers, not as a technical term for compassionate release.
This was the second time the DOC under Mayor Eric Adams’ administration released an inmate right before death.
Antonio Bradley, 28, attempted to hang himself in June.
The department released him after his suicide attempt, and he died shortly after. Similarly to Pondexter’s death, the DOC did not record Bradley’s as an in-custody death.
Molina personally intervened to ensure an inmate who was at risk of death was released from DOC custody in another instance.
Walter Turner, 42, was being held at Rikers when he started complaining about stomach pain. Medical staff only gave him Tylenol, but, after six days of illness, a doctor noticed his heart rate was elevated and his stomach was swollen, and he was admitted to NYC Health + Hospitals/Elmhurst.
Doctors found he was septic and needed surgery.
After surgery, doctors said he would never regain “meaningful consciousness.”
Molina personally visited Turner’s mother, Roslyn Greene-Turner, in the hospital and offered to “get him out of custody.”
The Legal Aid Society, the public defender organization that represented Pondexter and initially advocated for his release in order to increase access to family members, said the DOC should be more transparent.
“Mayor Adams and Commissioner Molina have demonstrated that they will not or cannot keep people safe in the New York City jails,” said the LAS in a statement to the Times. “We expect the department to be accountable for their actions in Mr. Pondexter’s final hours. To date, the department has failed to demonstrate accountability for the death toll, but instead rests in obfuscation and delay.”
In April, the LAS requested the court implement a federal receivership to take charge of the prison and force reforms to end abuse and neglect there.
A court ordered report on Rikers released in mid-March found abuse by guards and prisoners went unchecked, over 1,400 staff were listed as out sick on any given day and record keeping was in disarray.
In June, a judge accepted the city’s plan to reform Rikers, but pledged to review the city’s progress in November. The federal monitor that issued the March report will also produce another report in October on the DOC’s progress in fixing the problems that have drawn federal scrutiny.
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