NEW YORK (1010 WINS) — Four people who claim they were illegally jailed at Rikers Island immediately after arrest without having ever seen a judge and with no planned court date are suing the NYPD and the Department of Correction for the practice.
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New York State law mandates defendants be brought before a court “without unnecessary delay” after an arrest, but the NYPD Patrol Guide instructs officers to take people with bench warrants straight to detention after 5 p.m. on weekdays or any time on weekends, Hell Gate first reported.
“That policy is utterly lawless. It is not permitted by law in any sense — and is an exercise of raw military power by the City of New York,” wrote attorneys in the class action complaint. “That is, it appears that the only justification the City has for the policy is that it can. The incarcerations the City has performed under the policy are nothing short of an extrajudicial campaign of terror and kidnapping.”
The state law allows police to send defendants directly to jail if courts are closed, but in New York City, where courts run overnight, there should be no reason to jail anyone without seeing a judge — especially those with bench warrants.
Bench warrants are issued when someone misses a court date or court-ordered community service.
They don’t lead to arraignment and then a trial, but instead are designed simply to get a defendant back in front of a judge, at which point the warrant is cleared.
One of the defendants, Paul Phillips, was pulled over for a traffic infraction near Albany, according to the lawsuit.
The officer who pulled him over reportedly saw he had an open bench warrant from over 30 years ago — an extremely unlikely situation due to the nature of that type of warrant.
If he had been taken before a judge, the court would have found that his warrant had been closed long ago, but instead he was transferred to NYPD’s Bronx warrant division who took him to Rikers, where he was refused his medications for bipolar disorder, opioid addiction and PTSD, according to court documents.
It was only three days later when his fiancée contacted the Legal Aid Society searching for him that his friends and family were able to locate him at Rikers.
Even then, the DOC refused to release Phillips, because the only way out is through a court hearing. But he didn’t have a court hearing scheduled, because he was never brought before a court in the first place like he should have been, the suit claims.
The next day, he was unceremoniously released with no explanation and no paperwork indicating he had ever been illegally locked up, according to the complaint.
The fact that those who are jailed this way never go before a court, means they are never provided a follow up court date and they are never put in contact with a lawyer — two constitutional guarantees for arrestees.
Without a lawyer, these people may be unable to contact friends or family — appearing to have disappeared with no warning.
“They just sit in Rikers Island, unless and until someone outside learns that is where they are, and raises enough of a stink to get them into court,” wrote attorneys in the lawsuit. “Thus, there is no reason to believe there are not many people — human beings — just sitting in Rikers Island that the City has, in this way, disappeared. Nor is there any reason not to believe some of those people have been there for months if not years precisely because of the self-concealing nature of the City’s policies.”
The city has been aware of allegations that people are being unlawfully locked up at Rikers since at least December 2020, when the Legal Aid Society sent a letter to the Correction Department, senior judges and the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice about such cases.
The plaintiffs are seeking both compensation and “injunctive relief to stop this nightmare” — in other words, an immediate halt to the practice.
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