by Matt Katz, published May 30
Former Rikers Island detainees and defense attorneys testified at a City Council hearing on Tuesday that incarcerated people charged with crimes are regularly not being brought to their court appearances, even though ensuring that they get to court is the primary reason why they are held before trial.
Councilmembers said it is unclear exactly how many make their court appearances, since state court data conflicts with stats reported by the Department of Correction, but it appears that appearance rates for incarcerated people are plummeting, and are about the same for those who are free before trial.
One Rikers detainee told investigators that he was taken to a courthouse six times for hearings on his case, but was never brought to the actual courtroom to see a judge. Other detainees complained to their defense attorneys that they missed their court dates because correction officers failed to bring them and then falsely accused them of refusing to get on a bus to go.
Without court dates to order their releases or send them to prisons, people languish in jails on Rikers. Just this past week, the federal monitor overseeing city jails said Rikers detainees are at “imminent risk of harm” due to the city’s failure to keep them safe and provide emergency medical care.
The inability to bring people to court and process their cases also complicates the city’s legally mandated plan to close Rikers, since there are too many people locked up — approximately 6,000 — to relocate them to four new jails under construction elsewhere in the city.
Correction officials say the main reason why detained people don’t show up to court is because they simply refuse to go.
But councilmembers and defense lawyers cast doubt on that assertion. Some court appearances, like those to finalize plea deals or to remove bail, almost guarantee a detainee’s release, according to Joshua White, an attorney with New York County Defender Services.
“They have absolutely every reason to come to court, so when I’m told they’re refusing, I know it’s simply not true,” he said.
Chai Park Messina, deputy executive director of monitoring and research for the Board of Correction oversight agency, injected further skepticism into the department’s argument that it is largely incarcerated people’s fault when they don’t show up at court. She testified that when investigators asked the Department of Correction to view 72 videos that the department claimed it had of incarcerated people saying they refused to go to court, the department only provided 11 videos to back that up.
Park Messina also said when people are taken to court, they can be left on buses for hours without access to toilets, food or medicine, and some don’t even make it to the courtroom at all.
Paul Shechtman, the Department of Correction’s general counsel, said that the refusal of detainees to go to court is the reason the department is now authorizing “soft-hand force” to allow officers to pull detainees by the arm to get them on the bus to go to the borough courthouses.
Shechtman said that approach is working. After the number of detainees refusing to go to court spiked in March, “court production is now an area where we are doing much better,” he said.
But Eileen Maher of the activist group VOCAL New York, who is also a former Rikers detainee, told councilmembers that “soft-hand force” often escalates.
“If cracking someone’s skull, repeatedly kicking them, body-slamming them, or using pepper spray is soft force, what is strong force?” she said.
The problems with getting people to court contribute, at least in part, to the fact that the average length of stay at Rikers has skyrocketed over the last six years, according to data documented by the federal monitor, and is far higher than the national average. Hundreds of people have been held at Rikers, which is designed for short-term stays, for more than two years.
The City Council is offering a possible solution. Councilmember Carlina Rivera has introduced a bill that would require the Department of Correction to video record all interactions in which a person in custody allegedly refuses to attend a court appearance, and provide that recording to defense attorneys.
“This is not only fixable, but we will fix it,” Councilmember Gale Brewer said.