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News :: Civil & Human Rights : Crime & Police : Government Secrecy : Protest Activity |
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New York City's Mass Arrest Tactics, Tested Once in the Streets, Now Face a Test in Court |
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by Jim Dwyer
(No verified email address) |
16 Sep 2004
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The city's top lawyer, Michael C. Cardozo, told a judge that much of the delay was not caused by the city, since it took "five or six hours to get the fingerprints from Albany," referring to criminal history records maintained by the state.
Yet state officials have a different story. They say that they sent 94 percent of the fingerprint reports to the city in one hour or less. Only one set of fingerprints - of 3,620 processed by the state from Aug. 30 to Sept. 3 - took as long as five hours to return to New York City authorities, according to a computer report provided by Jessica Scaperotti, a spokeswoman for the state's Division of Criminal Justice Services. |
New York City has one memento from the 2004 Republican National Convention that seems destined to last: an especially bitter dispute over the city's methods and motives in detaining hundreds of protesters, well beyond the ordinary legal time limit of 24 hours, without the usual access to lawyers.
At times, the Police Department kept people in custody for two days or more before issuing them tickets for offenses like parading without a permit or disorderly conduct.
Led by a vigorous defense from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, city officials say they did their best under a sudden and extraordinary flood of arrests, acknowledging that bystanders may have been swept up. Lawyers for a number of protesters say what the city did amounted to illegal preventive detention, a calculated effort to limit the chances of confrontation and possible embarrassment.
The full dimensions of the dispute may emerge in a contempt-of-court hearing for the city on Sept. 27, and in civil lawsuits that have been filed or are threatened.
What is clear now - from interviews, a review of newly released city and state records, and a decision from a previously undisclosed court hearing - is that the city's new system for processing mass arrests speedily failed its first major test that week.
Further, at least one of the city's major justifications for delays in releasing protesters is not supported by state records. As well, the city chose not to abide by a state judge's direct order to grant lawyers immediate access to their clients. When another judge gave deadlines for the release of certain prisoners who had been held at length, top city officials repeatedly came back to court to report that they could not track the prisoners down in time.
While the mayor has accurately noted that prosecutors have dropped very few of the arrests, it is also true that more than 600 of the cases have been provisionally dismissed, indicating that the police detention amounted to a more severe punishment than any the courts would impose.
The city's top lawyer, Michael C. Cardozo, told a judge that much of the delay was not caused by the city, since it took "five or six hours to get the fingerprints from Albany," referring to criminal history records maintained by the state.
Yet state officials have a different story. They say that they sent 94 percent of the fingerprint reports to the city in one hour or less. Only one set of fingerprints - of 3,620 processed by the state from Aug. 30 to Sept. 3 - took as long as five hours to return to New York City authorities, according to a computer report provided by Jessica Scaperotti, a spokeswoman for the state's Division of Criminal Justice Services.
Numerous lawyers said they could not see their clients while they were in city custody. That state of affairs persisted even after a State Supreme Court judge in Manhattan, Emily Jane Goodman, drove to the courthouse at midnight on Sept. 1, and signed an order requiring the city to allow defense lawyers to meet their clients "forthwith."
Yet when defense lawyers delivered her order to corrections guards at a jail in the courthouse at 2:30 a.m. on Sept. 2, they were kept waiting nearly two hours and then were denied entry, according to Daniel L. Alterman, one of the lawyers. "The city refused to honor a lawful order of the court," Mr. Alterman said. Numerous other lawyers said they, too, had not been allowed to meet their clients in city jails or at a Hudson River pier used by the Police Department as a holding area.
Mr. Cardozo, the city's corporation counsel, said that he believed state law gave the city the right to an automatic stay of Justice Goodman's order in order to appeal to a higher court. John Feinblatt, the city's criminal justice coordinator, said that for logistical reasons, lawyers normally are not permitted to see their clients until they are in courthouse pens for arraignment, a point strongly disputed by defense lawyers. "There couldn't have been a night when safety reasons, security reasons, and efficiency reasons were more paramount," Mr. Feinblatt said.
A second state judge, John Cataldo of Supreme Court, gave the city a series of deadlines to bring prisoners before the court or release them during the last two days of the convention. Mr. Cardozo and Mr. Feinblatt told the judge that locating the prisoners was complicated because there were four places where they might be. Nearly 24 hours after the judge began setting deadlines that were not met, he held the city in contempt of court. In the next three hours, at least 311 people were released, records show.
Mr. Bloomberg has said that the office of Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, had declined to prosecute only three of the arrests. The district attorney "obviously thinks we behaved correctly and arrested the right people," Mr. Bloomberg said.
The prosecutor's office confirmed this week that it had dismissed only three cases. Still, of the 1,102 people who went before judges, 70 have pleaded guilty and 621 cases were "adjourned in contemplation of dismissal," according to Barbara Thompson, a spokeswoman for Mr. Morgenthau. Such dismissals require the person to stay out of trouble for six months. They are a common outcome of minor arrests, including those made at major protests.
The uproar over the arrests and detentions began near the end of a tumultuous week of demonstrations during the convention, which were largely free of the violence and destruction that had been predicted by some authorities. Mr. Bloomberg has said that the larger picture shows that the city did an excellent job of keeping the streets safe and protecting civil rights.
Mr. Bloomberg said that the city wanted to move faster in getting people out of jail, but that the police were stymied by an extraordinarily high number of arrests. There were 1,781 in all.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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