Council prepares take Adams admin to court over solitary ban
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The City Council on Thursday passed a resolution allowing Speaker Adrienne Adams to take legal action against the Adams administration should they fail to implement the council’s law banning solitary confinement. Photo by John McCarten/NYC Council Media Unit
By Jacob Kaye
The fight over a law banning solitary confinement in the city’s jails continued on Thursday when the City Council opened the door to taking legal action against the Adams administration, which asked a judge last month to allow them to skirt the law’s implementation.
The City Council passed a resolution on Thursday that will allow Council Speaker Adrienne Adams “to engage in legal action on behalf of the council to defend Local Law 42,” which was passed by a super majority of the council in December.
Though the bill, which, among other things, puts strict limits on the amount of time detainees can be held in isolated conditions, is set to go into effect on July 28, the Adams administration began taking steps in June to indefinitely delay the law from officially hitting the books.
The resolution is the latest escalation over the bill between the council and Mayor Eric Adams. The mayor, who has long opposed the legislation, vetoed the bill shortly after the council passed it at the end of last year’s legislative session. The council overrode his veto not long after, passing the bill officially into law.
But Adams and his Department of Correction have shown little sign that they’ll put the law into action by the late July start date.
“It’s unfortunate that the council is forced to defend our institutional prerogative after passing Local Law 42 and then overriding the mayor’s veto,” City Councilmember Sandy Nurse, who chairs the Committee on Criminal Justice and who served as the sponsor of Thursday’s resolution alongside Councilmember Carlina Rivera, told the Eagle in a statement. “However, it’s clear the mayor will try to weaken the law in court.”
“My resolution allows us to not only defend the council’s authority, but recommits us to banning this cruel practice in our city jails,” the Brooklyn lawmaker added. “This is a vital step in ensuring humane treatment in our jails and protecting the health and dignity of every individual. We must stand firm in our commitment to justice and human rights.”
Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, who originally sponsored the solitary confinement ban bill, praised the council for preparing to take the Adams administration to court over the legislation.
“The administration clearly has the resources to implement Local Law 42. Instead, they’re using those resources to try to preserve the status quo on Rikers,” Williams said. “I had hoped that when the Council overrode the mayor’s veto with more votes than the bill was originally passed by, the mayor would work to implement the law and improve conditions on Rikers.”
“There is still an opportunity for the administration to act in good faith, but the Council’s vote today provides a safeguard and path to enact that a policy overwhelmingly approved by lawmakers is carried out in city jails,” he added.
City Hall did not respond to request for comment on Thursday.
The council’s resolution comes around three months after the city’s Board of Correction, which provides oversight to the DOC and the city’s jails, voted to create the rules by which the ban on solitary confinement will be implemented.
Under the rules, incarcerated individuals who commits a violation behind bars and is ordered to restricted housing 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 allow for people in custody being placed in restrictive housing to have a hearing on whether or not their placement in restrictive housing is necessary. During that hearing, they 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's supposed to include programming and activities, according to the law.
Adams, correction officers and the DOC have repeatedly denied that solitary confinement is used in the city’s jails. However, that claim has been disputed by lawmakers, formerly incarcerated individuals, defense attorneys, researchers and judges.
In a letter to federal Judge Laura Swain in June, attorneys for City Hall said that they planned to challenge the city’s solitary confinement ban. The attorneys claimed that if they were to enact the law, they’d fall out of compliance with the consent judgment in a case known as Nunez v. the City of New York – the city has already been accused of being out of compliance with the court order in the case and now faces a federal takeover of Rikers Island as a result.
The city’s attorneys called on Swain, who oversees the case, to suspend the law until the federal monitor Swain appointed to track the Department of Correction’s compliance with the consent judgment has had time to approve its implementation.
The monitor, Steve J. Martin, has previously called into question the DOC’s ability to safely implement the law, while also lauding its intention.
“As Mayor Adams and the federal monitor have stated, [the ban on solitary confinement] could endanger both our Department of Correction staff and those in our care,” a spokesperson for the mayor said in June in regard to the filing. “The monitor has previously stated that this bill could impede our ability to comply with the Nunez court orders, which is why we are requesting further evaluation from the judge.”
Beyond preparing for a legal challenge to the law, it’s unclear if the Adams administration and the DOC have taken any steps toward actually implementing the law, which is currently scheduled to take effect in a little over a week from the time of this writing.
During an unrelated interview with the Eagle on June 6, DOC Commissioner Lynelle Maginley-Liddie said that the agency was “working with the Law Department on [the law’s] implementation.”
When asked specifically if that meant the city would be challenging the law in court, Maginley-Liddie said, “We’ve just been working with the Law Department on next steps.”
A spokesperson for the DOC said on Thursday that the “department is conferring with the Federal Monitoring team and the Law Department on next steps in regards to the implementation of Local Law 42 of 2024.”
Should the DOC not take action to put the law into place before July 28, it wouldn’t be the first time the Adams administration ignored a bill passed into law by the council. The administration is currently locked into a court proceeding defending its choice not to implement a council law aimed at expanding eligibility for the city’s housing voucher program.
On Thursday, the council speaker insisted that despite the legal battles, she and the mayor have maintained a good one-on-one relationship and have “compartmentalized” their policy squabbles.
Nonetheless, after the mayor said publicly in recent days that he was growing tired of the public clashes, the speaker said she agreed.
“We’re all tired of the back and forth,” Speaker Adams said. “But things happen in those compartments.”
