City nominates itself to take over Rikers
/
The city on Friday said that if a federal judge decides to appoint a receiver to take over Rikers Island, she should look no further than current Department of Correction Commissioner Lynelle Maginley-Liddie. File photo via NYC mayor’s office
By Jacob Kaye
City Hall late Friday told a federal judge that she should look no further than the current Department of Correction commissioner should she choose to strip the city of its control of Rikers Island and hand the notorious jail complex over to a receiver.
The proposal, which was submitted to federal Judge Laura Swain alongside a separate receivership proposal from federal prosecutors and the Legal Aid Society, would see current DOC boss Lynelle Manginley-Liddie take on the dual role of commissioner and “compliance director,” charged with making sure the agency was following the court orders outlined in the ongoing detainee rights case known as Nunez v. the City of New York.
But the Legal Aid Society, federal prosecutors, advocates and others said the city’s proposal would do little to address the dysfunctional agency and jail complex where over 100 people have died in the past decade.
Swain, who recently said she was “inclined” to appoint a receiver to take over Rikers, ordered the city, federal prosecutors and the Legal Aid Society, which represents the class of detainees in the case, to meet and discuss the structure of a receiver with her federal monitor, Steve J. Martin, in September. Her consideration of the extreme remedy came after she found that the city had largely failed to reduce violence and fix mismanagement of the DOC in the 10 years the city has been under court order to do so.
And while the judge previously said that she had hoped both sides would come to an agreement over receivership, Friday’s late night filing showed that after months of meetings, the parties were nowhere near being on the same page about what a receiver should look like.
Under the city’s proposal, Maginley-Liddie would answer to Swain directly regarding the Nunez court orders – Swain found the city in contempt of 18 of those orders in November. As commissioner of the agency, Maginley-Liddie would continue to answer to the mayor, however the mayor would not be able to fire her during her five-year term.
It’s unclear from the proposal whether Maginley-Liddie would work part-time as the compliance director, focused solely on the Nunez orders, and part-time as commissioner.
The city claimed their proposed receivership structure would satisfy Swain’s concern that attempts to reduce violence on Rikers over the past decade have been stymied by turnover in both the mayor’s and commissioner’s offices.
“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 in her November order.
The city on Friday also claimed their plan was the simplest option – time wouldn’t be wasted looking for a new receiver or bringing them up to speed on the case and conditions of Rikers, and appointing Maginley-Liddie as the compliance director would come at no cost to taxpayers because she’s already on the city’s payroll.
“Defendants’ compliance director proposal is the most narrowly tailored, speedy and effective means to achieve the court’s goal of maintaining sound leadership of DOC, committed to Nunez compliance, who may seek additional relief from the court without the consent of any other city government official,” the city’s proposal read.
The city has long hung their hopes to stave off receivership on Manginley-Liddie.
The commissioner was appointed by Mayor Eric Adams, who is vehemently opposed to receivership, in December 2023, several months after Swain said she’d begin to consider taking the jails out of the city’s hands. At the time, Swain’s patience with the city had appeared to be wearing thin, due in part to the mismanagement of Rikers by the previous commissioner, Louis Molina.
Maginley-Liddie had a familiarity with the Nunez case and an existing relationship with the monitor. She started with the DOC as an agency attorney in 2015, the same year the Nunez consent judgment was put in place. Adams touted her connection to the case when he appointed her a little more than a year ago. City attorneys also argued against receivership in a filing last year claiming that Maginley-Liddie should be given time to turn conditions on Rikers around.
“In her tenure, both the federal monitor and the court have recognized Commissioner Maginley-Liddie’s commitment to reform, collaboration, and transparency,” a DOC spokesperson told the Eagle on Friday. “‘The proposal is focused on maintaining and accelerating the Commissioner’s sustained progress to create safer, more secure facilities for staff and those in our care.”
The Legal Aid Society and others bashed the city’s proposal as a naked attempt to retain control of the jails while ignoring the need for reform demanded by Swain last year.
“We are disappointed the city did not consent to this opportunity for change,” the Legal Aid Society said in a statement. “In fact, their proposal does the exact opposite: it preserves the status quo by granting the commissioner a second title, and securing her tenure through 2030, without demanding more.”
“In short, the ‘relief’ proposed by the city today brazenly offers no relief at all,” they added. “The catastrophic record of violence and dysfunction that led the court to find the city in contempt of 18 separate requirements of court orders, and the daily harm people endure in the city’s custody, demands more, as our papers demonstrate.”
Under the Legal Aid Society’s proposal, Swain would look to an outside, independent authority to appoint as receiver.
The receiver “would be someone from outside DOC who has extensive corrections experience and a demonstrated track record of implementing meaningful reforms in a large corrections system,” the Legal Aid Society’s proposal read.
The receiver, who would answer directly to Swain, would be given the powers of the commissioner when it comes to implementing the reforms required by the Nunez orders but would still work collaboratively with the existing DOC commissioner. A receiver would have the ability to enact new policies, hire and fire all staff and contractors, negotiate new contracts with labor unions and have unfettered access to all DOC records, facilities and incarcerated people.
Should the Legal Aid Society’s structure be enacted by Swain, the receiver would serve until the judge believes the city is in substantial compliance with the consent judgment. Given the knottiness of the crises that have plagued Rikers for decades, that could potentially mean the receiver would need years or decades to complete the job, as has been the case for other similar receiverships around the country over the past half century.
While the proposals are wildly different, the Legal Aid Society’s proposal more closely resembles receiverships over other jails and prisons seen in U.S. history. While the nine receiverships seen in the country in the past 50 years have varied, most were led by an independent, court-appointed authority.
Norman Siegel, a longtime civil rights attorney who has publicly shared his interest in the receivership job, told the Eagle of Friday that he felt the city’s proposal was “inadequate.”
“A receiver, in my opinion, should be someone from outside the system, because people within the system, as hard as they tried, were not able to not only address and eliminate the problems, but appeared that they haven't been able to ameliorate the problem,” Siegel said.
Advocates blasted the city’s proposal as a “mockery.”
“This is shameful,” Yonah Zeitz, the director of advocacy at the Katal Center for Equity, Health, and Justice. “The status quo is not acceptable. As the monitor has repeatedly reported, Rikers is a danger to people detained there and those who work there.”
“For our members and allies, there is no time to waste as people detained at Rikers continue to languish and die due to continued constitutional violations,” he added.
