Judge ‘inclined’ to strip city of control of Rikers Island

A federal judge said she was inclined to strip the city of its control of rikers island on Wednesday, nov. 27, 2024. Eagle file photo by Jacob Kaye

By Jacob Kaye

A federal judge said that she was leaning toward taking the extreme measure of stripping the city of its control of Rikers Island after ruling on Wednesday that the Department of Correction violated over a dozen court orders by failing to keep detainees safe in the troubled jail complex.

In a major ruling, Judge Laura Swain sided with the Legal Aid Society and federal prosecutors, who represent the plaintiffs in the decade-old detainee rights case known as Nunez v. the City of New York, and said the city was in contempt of the 2015 consent judgment in the case. In the nearly 10 years of the life of the consent judgment, Swain said the city had failed to curtail stabbings and slashings, fights, assaults on staff, in-custody deaths and use of force incidents, which were at the heart of the original lawsuit.

By many measures, the jails are more violent today than they were in the years before the court’s first orders.

“There has been no substantial reduction in the risk of harm currently facing those who live and work in the Rikers Island jails,” Swain said in the ruling. “Worse still, the unsafe and dangerous conditions in the jails, which are characterized by unprecedented rates of use of force and violence, have become normalized despite the fact that they are clearly abnormal and unacceptable.”

Swain, whose ruling comes several days after her court-appointed monitor in the case, Steve J. Martin, issued a lengthy report finding that violent conditions in the jail have largely continued under the DOC’s new commissioner, Lynelle Maginley-Liddie, found the city in contempt of all 18 court orders the Legal Aid Society claimed the city was in violation of.

Swain also said that she was inclined to grant the Legal Aid Society’s demand that she put Rikers Island into a federal receivership, taking control of the jails away from the city and putting it into the hands of a court-appointed authority.

While Swain refrained from explicitly ordering the creation of a receiver, she said that it appeared to be the only way to get the city to fix the violent conditions that have plagued Rikers Island for decades.

She also didn’t appear to give the city an alternative way to purge themselves of the contempt ruling. The judge said she weighed fining the city until they came into compliance, a measure that would “in effect be a burden on taxpayers.” She also said that more “extreme” remedies, like convening a judicial panel to begin ordering detainees be released from Rikers, “would also be inappropriate at this juncture.”

In the end, she said receivership appeared to be the best and only remaining option.

Though the city argued that Maginley-Liddie, who has enjoyed a far better relationship with the monitor and the judge than her predecessor, should be given time to improve conditions on Rikers, Swain said that she worried the new commissioner would fall into the “unfortunate cycle” that has plagued the DOC.

“The glacial pace of reform can be explained by an unfortunate cycle demonstrated by DOC leadership, which has changed materially a number of times over the life of the Court’s orders, wherein initiatives are created, changed in some material way or abandoned, and then restarted,” she said.

Swain added that even well-intentioned commissioners are subject to the political will of the mayor, and that those pressures have prevented major changes from coming to Rikers over the past decade.

“The last nine years also leave no doubt that continued insistence on compliance with the court’s orders by persons answerable principally to political authorities would lead only to confrontation and delay; that the current management structure and staffing are insufficient to turn the tide within a reasonable period; that defendants have consistently fallen short of the requisite compliance with court orders for years, at times under circumstances that suggest bad faith; and that enormous resources — that the city devotes to a system that is at the same time overstaffed and underserved — are not being deployed effectively,” Swain said.

“For those reasons, the court is inclined to impose a receivership: namely, a remedy that will make the management of the use of force and safety aspects of the Rikers Island jails ultimately answerable directly to the court,” she added.

Regardless of how much control a receiver has over Rikers, it is almost certain that any form of receivership would have major implications on how the dangerous jails are run.

The Legal Aid Society has argued that a receiver should be given a bulk of the powers and responsibilities currently given to the DOC commissioner. They’ve also called for a receiver to have expanded hiring powers and not be subject to a number of local laws or collective bargaining agreements, like the one the city has with the Correctional Officers Benevolent Association.

Mayor Eric Adams and Maginley-Liddie, both of whom have publicly argued against receivership, are likely to push back against such a hand off of power.

“Our administration — with Commissioner Maginley-Liddie at the helm of the Department of Correction — has made significant progress towards addressing the decades-long neglect and issues on Rikers Island,” a spokesperson for the mayor said, despite Swain rejecting the city’s argument that Maginley-Liddie alone was capable of reversing decades of mismanagement and violence on Rikers. “We are proud of our work, but recognize there is more to be done and look forward to working with the federal monitoring team on our shared goal of continuing to improve the safety of everyone in our jails.”

In a statement, a spokesperson for the Legal Aid Society "commended" Swain for her decision.

“This is a historic decision,” the spokesperson said. “The court’s recognition that the current structure has failed, and that receivership free from political and other external influences is the path forward, can ensure that all New Yorkers, regardless of incarceration status, are treated with the respect and dignity guaranteed to them under the law.”

The ruling was celebrated by a number of criminal justice advocacy groups and lawmakers, many of which have been calling for Swain to implement a receiver for years.

Yonah Zeitz, the advocacy director of the Katal Center for Equity, Health, and Justice, said that the language used by Swain in her ruling “mirrors what Katal members and partners have been saying for years: Rikers is a danger to people detained there and those who work there.”

New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, who recently launched a bid to challenge Adams in next year’s mayoral primary, was one of the first citywide elected officials to explicitly call for receivership. He said in a social media post on Wednesday that Swain’s decision “takes an essential step in the right direction toward ending this crisis.”

But some have been more wary of receivership and have argued that there’s no guarantee that a changing of the guard will lead to safer conditions for detainees and staff who work on Rikers.

Among them is Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, who said on Wednesday that he didn’t "celebrate this development.”

“Receivership is not a panacea, and comes with many of its own challenges, particularly in light of the incoming presidential administration,” Williams said in a statement, adding that the only way he feels the city can truly address the violence on Rikers is to follow the letter of its own law and shut it down as a jail complex by August 2027.

Outright opposed to the ruling was the Correctional Officers Benevolent Association, the union that represents correctional officers.

“Outsourcing control of Rikers Island to a federal receiver, will not be a silver bullet and will not solve any of these problems,” said Benny Boscio, the president of the union. “Giving correction officers the manpower and resources to enforce law and order in our jails will."

The Legal Aid Society first called on Swain to issue a contempt ruling and order a receiver in 2022. The judge instead ordered the city to create and implement an “action plan” to address the increased violence and disorder on Rikers that arose during the pandemic.

A year later, Swain determined the action plan hadn’t done much to quell the violence and allowed the Legal Aid Society to again propose receivership.

For much of the past year, Swain has weighed whether or not the city has lived up to the requirements of the consent judgement, which has expanded over the years to include 31 different court orders.

In September, Swain heard oral arguments from the Legal Aid Society, federal prosecutors and the city on the question of contempt, and already appeared to be leaning toward receivership.

At the close of the court appearance, she ordered all the parties in the case to begin to meet and together craft what a receivership may look like.

Major questions about receivership remain, including whether or not the receiver would supplant or work alongside the DOC commissioner, the process for appointing a receiver, what qualifications the receiver should have, their tenure and their powers.

In mid-January, the monitor is expected to issue a report detailing the substance of the recent meetings regarding receivership. The report will also include the proposed framework for the federal takeover.

This story was updated at 4:45 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 27, 2024.