Council passes bill in hopes more detainees are brought to court on time
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The City Council passed a bill last week that they say will cut back on the number of detainees who are not produced by the Department of Correction fro court appearances. Eagle file photo by Jacob Kaye
By Jacob Kaye
The City Council last week passed legislation they say will not only ensure detainees get to their court appearances on time, but will also help the city reach its legally-mandated deadline to close Rikers Island by the summer of 2027.
On Thursday, the city’s legislative body passed a bill that would require the city’s Department of Correction to make a number of changes to how it tracks, documents and reports how it gets detainees to their scheduled court appearances.
The legislation, which was first introduced earlier this year, follows what was a precipitous drop in the percentage of detainees being brought by the DOC to their court appearances on time.
Though the agency’s rate of success in getting detainees to court has improved over the last year, it hit record lows during the first year of DOC Commissioner Louis Molina’s tenure leading the agency.
And regardless of how successful the agency has been in getting detainees before a judge, advocates and lawmakers say the DOC has not been transparent about what causes the delays and how it tracks its success rate.
“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 being held before trial,” City Councilmember Carlina Rivera, the chair of the Criminal Justice Committee and the sponsor of the legislation, said during a press conference before Thursday’s council meeting. “This legislation ensures accountability on both sides.”
The bill requires that Department of Correction officers record their interactions with detainees whenever a detainee is being informed of their scheduled court appearance.
Under the legislation, the troubled agency would also be required to provide real time updates to attorneys about the status of their client’s trip to a courthouse.
The bill also requires the DOC send data on court production outcomes to the mayor’s office, the City Council and the public each month.
During a May hearing on the bill, the DOC’s top attorney, Paul Shechtman, told lawmakers that the agency’s ability to get detainees to court was improving after a year marked by a troubling decline.
From September to December 2022, more than a quarter of detainees were not brought by the DOC to court on time, Gothamist reported in February. The court production rate was the worst the department had seen since 1999, the year the agency began keeping data on the statistic.
DOC officials, including Commissioner Louis Molina, frequently claimed that the drop in court production was largely attributable to a rash of refusals from detainees uninterested in making the trip to the courthouse – that claim, and others surrounding court production, were questioned by defense attorneys and others.
But in 2023, the DOC’s court production numbers began to improve, the agency said. During the hearing, Shechtman attributed the increase to a new approach to getting detainees out of their cell, into a bus and through the courthouse doors known as a “soft hand” approach, which allows correctional officers to take a detainee by the arm and bring them to the bus in cases where the defendant does not want to go to court.
“If you say to people, ‘Get on the bus,’ and if they know you're going to grab them by the arm and put them on the bus, they go on the bus and you don't have to use force,” the attorney said at the time.
During fiscal year 2023, 92 percent of detainees made their court appearances on time, according to the DOC – that number drops for teleconference court appearances, where detainees were produced 89 percent of the time, the agency said.
At the time of the hearing, Shechtman told lawmakers that he didn’t believe the bill was necessary because of the agencies improved ability to get detainees to court.
A spokesperson for the DOC on Friday told the Eagle that “the department will comply with the law,” when asked about the bill’s passage.
But during the May hearing, councilmembers, advocates and public defense attorneys questioned the DOC’s newfound success and claimed that the DOC’s data likely didn’t reflect the true nature of the situation. They also said that detainees were continuing to miss court appearances in droves.
At the time of the hearing, the DOC collected its data on court production by hand, and lawmakers said that the outdated method had left an inaccurate picture of who was and wasn’t produced for court. Sometimes, defendants were sent to court when they were not on a judge’s docket that day and other times defendants are told by DOC officials that they didn't have a record of a court appearance that day when in fact there was one on the books, according to advocates.
Marva Brown, an attorney with the Legal Aid Society, said in May that on “too many occasions, [she] sat in court on a scheduled court appearance date, waiting for hours on end for an incarcerated client who is simply not produced to court.”
Brown said that she and her colleagues have been told that the reason their client wasn’t in court was because they refused, only to learn later that that wasn’t the case.
Brown cited the case of a Queens man she referred to as “Mr. M,” who was not produced for court on the day of one of his appearances, and whose attorneys were told that he had refused to get on the bus. However, after the attorneys requested video of Mr. M’s refusal, he “was miraculously produced to court on the next bus from the island.”
While an inconvenience to attorneys, judges, prosecutors and others, the harm of non-production is the ultimate delay in a case, advocates say.
The Department of Correction will be required to record its interactions with detainees during attempts to get them to court, should a bill passed by the City Council be signed into law by the mayor. AP file photo by Seth Wenig
“This leads to delays in the criminal process, wasted time for loved ones and witnesses and increased periods of incarceration on matters that would otherwise be resolved had the client been produced to court,” Brown said at the hearing.
For the defendant, missing one court date could mean they don’t appear before a judge for another several months – on average, detainees have court appearances every 57 days.
According to Rivera, the delays put further stress on “an already backlogged court system.”
“It can delay a person's release, it can eventually cause death, it delays connection to mental health programs and substance use disorder services, if needed, and much, much more,” the lawmaker said.
City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams said that the bill could aid in the city’s efforts to shut down Rikers Island as a jail complex by 2024.
Currently, the main impediment to meeting that goal is the jail’s ballooning population. There are currently around 6,200 detainees being held in the jail complex per day, a number that, after years of decline, has been on the rise for the past several years.
The borough-based jails planned to replace Rikers in 2027 are expected to be built to have the capacity to hold 3,300 detainees at any given time.
“The longer those who are incarcerated stay in jail, the larger the jail population, and that must be resolved as we get closer to the 2027 deadline to close Rikers,” the speaker said. “It is critical that our city government takes steps to ensure those who are detained are brought to their court hearings and trials on time, and this legislation will help advance those efforts.”
In addition to the jail’s growing population, the city has missed several other milestones associated with its plan to close Rikers, raising doubts about its ability to hit the deadline.
Additionally, Mayor Eric Adams has called into question the feasibility of the plan, and in August called on the City Council to craft a new plan to close the jail where nine people have died this year, including a 27-year-old man who died on Thursday, the day the bill was passed by the council.
