Council takes mayor to court for blocking law banning solitary on Rikers
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The New York City Council sued Mayor Eric Adams’ administration on Monday claiming an executive order he passed in July as a means to skirt around a law banning solitary confinement was illegal. Photos by Jacob Kaye/Emil Cohen, NYC Council Media Unit/Ed Reed, Mayoral Photography Office
By Jacob Kaye
Mayor Eric Adams was sued by the City Council on Monday for his refusal to implement a law banning solitary confinement in the city’s jails.
The lawsuit, which marks the latest jab in the ongoing fight between the mayor and the Council over the ban on solitary confinement known as Local Law 42, claims the mayor illegally used his emergency executive order powers to halt the law’s implementation in July.
The filing in Manhattan’s Supreme Court comes a year after the Council passed the controversial piece of legislation, which the mayor, Department of Correction commissioner and correctional officers union strongly opposed, and about six months after Adams issued his 11th-hour order stopping the bill from going into effect.
The mayor said in his order, which was issued a day before the DOC would have been legally required to begin following the new law, that the general state of dysfunction and violence on Rikers Island made implementation of Local Law 42 dangerous. But the Council said in its lawsuit that the mayor manufactured the state of emergency in an effort to illegally skirt the ban.
“The democratic process of lawmaking cannot justifiably be declared a state of emergency, and Mayor Adams’ emergency orders are an unlawful and unprecedented abuse of power,” Council Speaker Adrienne Adams said in a statement.
The lawsuit called on a judge to toss Mayor Adams’ executive order, which he’s re-issued every five days since July 27. A similar executive order declaring a state of emergency on Rikers Island first introduced by former Mayor Bill de Blasio and continued by Mayor Adams has allowed the city to legally ignore a number of standards of detainee care set by the Board of Correction dating back to 2021.
But the Council said in its suit that the mayor’s order halting the solitary confinement ban violated the city’s laws in at least four ways.
The legislature claimed there was no real “public emergency” to justify the order, nor was there any rationale behind the mayor’s claim that the ban would threaten public safety. The suit also alleges the mayor “failed to meet the multiple enumerated requirements for the suspension of a local law” and that the order violated the intent of the city’s separation of powers.
“[T]he Mayor’s illegal suspension of Local Law 42 sets a dangerous precedent for future mayors to abuse their emergency powers when they are dissatisfied with the outcome of lawful democratic processes and have lost a policy debate,” the lawsuit reads.
Amaris Cockfield, a spokesperson for the mayor, defended the mayor’s use of the executive order in a statement.
“To continue to protect public health and safety in Department of Correction jails, the mayor issued a narrowly-tailored executive order focused on reducing violence in our jails,” Cockfield said.
Under the solitary confinement ban, incarcerated individuals who commit a violation behind bars would be prevented from being held in an isolated cell for more than two hours per day within a 24-hour period and for more than eight hours at night directly after an alleged offense occurred – the confinement would be referred to as a “de-escalation” period. Should corrections officials determine that further confinement is required to de-escalate a situation, an incarcerated person could be held for up to four hours total in a 24-hour period.
The law would also require the DOC to hold a hearing before placing someone in restrictive housing. During that hearing, the detainee would be allowed to be represented by an advocate, be it a lawyer, law student, paralegal or another incarcerated person. Local Law 42 also requires that people in restrictive housing are given access to at least 14 hours of out-of-cell time per day. That time is supposed to include programming and activities, according to the law.
The legislation also limits the use of handcuffs to restrain detainees during trips to the courthouse.
After floundering in the Council for several years, the ban on solitary confinement was passed by a super majority of the Council on the final day of its legislative session in 2023. The mayor quickly vetoed the bill in January only to have his veto predictably overturned by the Council about a month later.
But as the July implementation date came closer, questions about the Adams administration’s plan to put the law in place began to swirl.
The DOC had given no update on any changes they had made to their policies or procedures in order to come into compliance with Local Law 42. DOC Commissioner Lynelle Maginley- Liddie, who earlier in the year released a two-minute video warning against the law’s “flaws,” told the Eagle shortly before the bill was set to take effect that the agency had “been working with the Law Department on next steps.”
The result was Adams’ emergency executive order.
“There were some parts of it that were extremely dangerous to the inmates,” the mayor said in defense of the “temporary pause” of Local Law 42 in July. “The goal is we want to make sure the spirit of the law does not get in the way of the implementation of the law.”
Though the Council’s lawsuit filed this week comes months after Mayor Adams’ initial order, it wasn’t entirely unexpected. Several weeks before the mayor declared the emergency, the Council passed a resolution allowing the speaker to “engage in legal action on behalf of the Council to defend Local Law 42.”
Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, who served as the main sponsor of the bill, said in a statement Monday that he was “proud to partner with the speaker to ensure that the mayor can't continue abusing the declaration of a 'state of emergency' to preserve his ego or political goals.”
“Despite his desperate power grabs, this mayor can't just ignore the laws he doesn't like,” Williams said. “Ending the harmful isolation of solitary is a moral and legal imperative, yet the administration is desperately trying to maintain a status quo on Rikers that is dangerous to people on both sides of the bars.”
Though the mayor and his corrections department say they no longer use solitary confinement to restrain and punish detainees, multiple reports and first-hand accounts from detainees, lawyers and researchers appear to dispute that claim.
In October, a former social worker on Rikers Island told the DOC’s oversight board that officers were regularly locking detainees with mental illnesses inside cells for weeks or months at a time without access to their needed medication, leaving them to deteriorate. The alleged practice called deadlocking, which had not previously been described to the public, would likely be in violation of a number of elements of Local Law 42.
Though Maginley-Liddie claimed that she did not know the practice was being used by officers, she asked the city’s Department of Investigation to look into it.
City Councilmember Sandy Nurse, who chairs the Council’s Committee on Criminal Justice, told the Eagle in November that despite Local Law 42 and a number of other rules and laws limiting the use of solitary in New York, “it's clear that forms of solitary confinement are being utilized as a tactic, in violation of protocol.”
“[Local Law 42] needs to be implemented,” she added.
Complicating the Council’s lawsuit and the implementation of the solitary confinement ban is the prospect of a federal takeover of Rikers Island.
Two weeks ago, federal Judge Laura Swain said that she was inclined to strip the city of control of the troubled jail complex after finding them in contempt of 18 provisions of a 2015 consent judgment in the detainee civil rights case known as Nunez v. the City of New York.
Prior to Swain’s ruling, the city had argued that implementing Local Law 42 would bring them out of compliance with the consent judgment, an assertion Swain’s court-appointed monitor, Steve J. Martin, didn’t exactly shoot down.
In recent weeks, the monitor has been meeting with attorneys for the DOC and the Council to discuss how the law might clash with the court’s longstanding orders.
In a November report, Martin said the evaluation was “an exceedingly complicated undertaking.”
“The monitoring team is committed to conducting a fulsome, comprehensive and integrated assessment of the aspects of [Local Law 42] that may conflict with the monitor’s duty to approve various department policies and cannot do so in a piecemeal fashion which would undermine the integrity of the overall process,” the monitor wrote in the report. “Each facet is complex and nuanced and must be carefully and thoroughly analyzed by those with operational expertise and experience with large-scale reform efforts.”
Martin is expected to release a report detailing the implementation of Local Law 42 in January.
Update: This story was updated with comment from the mayor’s office at 10:33 a.m. on Monday, Dec. 9, 2024.
