Case Explained:This article breaks down the legal background, charges, and implications of Case Explained: Blizzard Disrupts City’s Criminal Courts Already Seeing Long Delays – Legal Perspective
A major snowstorm that blanketed the city overnight forced criminal arraignment courts across New York City to remain closed until 2 p.m. Monday, delaying the processing of newly arrested people and raising fresh concerns about potential backlogs in already strained holding facilities and courthouses.
By mid-afternoon, courts began working through arrests mostly made before the snow began to pummel the city Sunday night, according to a spokesperson for the state’s Office of Court Administration.
The temporary shutdown came just days after the Legal Aid Society filed an emergency habeas corpus petition accusing the Police Department and the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office of holding people for longer than the legally allowed 24 hours before arraignment.
Under a landmark New York Court of Appeals 1991 ruling commonly known as Roundtree, police must bring someone arrested without a warrant before a judge “without unnecessary delay,” which courts have interpreted to generally mean within 24 hours, except in extraordinary circumstances. The decision has long served as the legal backbone governing how long people can be held in central booking before arraignment.
When attorneys filed the so-called writ on Feb. 13, the scale of the backlog was significant, according to Legal Aid.
In Brooklyn, 317 people were awaiting arraignment including 127 who had already been held for more than 24 hours.
“That’s a very, very high number in terms of what we are used to seeing,” Jennifer Hose, a supervising attorney with Legal Aid’s Decarceration Project, told THE CITY about the Brooklyn figures.
By contrast, in Manhattan, there were 175 people awaiting arraignment, with 32 over the 24-hour threshold, while the Bronx had 162 people waiting, including 58 held longer than a day.
Legal Aid attorneys sought immediate court intervention, asking a judge to order the release of anyone held beyond the legal time limits unless officials could provide a sufficient explanation for the delays.
The Legal Aid complaint triggered a major response from top city police officials and state court bigwigs.
The NYPD’s deputy commissioner of operations and the Office of Court of Administration chief administrative judge came to the Brooklyn arraignment courts to speed along cases, said Tina Luongo, chief attorney of the Criminal Defense Practice at The Legal Aid Society.
“Everybody was paying attention. They opened extra parts [of the court] and a lobster shift from 1 a.m. to 8 a.m.,” she added.
It took four days before Brooklyn Supreme Court Judge Adam Perlmutter formally took on the case due to the President’s Day weekend.
Last Tuesday, he ordered the NYPD to detail every person who was being held at that time for longer than 24 hours and to explain why they were still locked up.
By then, practically the entire backlog had been cleared.
Blame to Go Around
Still, even after it was resolved, the logjam triggered finger-pointing across the city’s criminal justice system.
Legal Aid blamed police for increasing low-level arrests that add volume to already strained arraignment calendars.
In a statement Monday, the New York City Police Department said there have been no recent policy changes that would affect arrest levels.
“There was a slight uptick two weeks ago, but that increase should not have impacted the system this significantly,” a department spokesperson said via email. “This is more an issue about the OCA not processing people efficiently.”
The Office of Court Administration did not respond to an email seeking comment regarding the court case.
Police officials also said the department had repeatedly asked the New York State Unified Court System to open additional court sections in recent weeks to ensure people were arraigned within legal time limits but were told staffing shortages prevented that from happening.
The department pointed to a series of disruptions that it said contributed to delays, including limited court operations on Lincoln’s Birthday and Presidents’ Day holidays, as well as construction that affected detainee movement inside the Brooklyn courthouse on Feb. 14.
Legal Aid attorneys contend many arrests are unnecessary and could instead be handled with desk appearance tickets, while also faulting prosecutors for choosing to pursue some of those cases.
Brooklyn DA spokesperson Oren Yaniv said all the cases involved people with long rap sheets.
“The low-level transit cases that resulted in custodial arrests overwhelmingly involved individuals with extensive criminal histories that raised legitimate concerns about the risk of further offenses,” Yaniv told THE CITY in a statement.
Legal Aid countered, saying four of the cases involved a person arrested for using two seats on the subway, said Hose, who noted some of those people had other outstanding warrants.
One person was arrested for double parking and spent more than 24 hours making their way through the arraignment process, she added, noting that person did not have an open warrant in another case.
The arrests come as Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch has publicly rejected suggestions that the department is returning to so-called broken windows policing. That crime prevention policy — celebrated during the Giuliani administration — focused on low-level quality of life crimes as a way of making a community feel safer.
Speaking to reporters in early January, Tisch said the NYPD’s Quality of Life Division was created in response to a sharp rise in 311 complaints involving noise and parking abuses across the city, not as a broad crackdown strategy.
“By no means a return to broken windows policing,” Tisch said, describing the initiative as an effort to respond to neighborhood concerns such as noise complaints and abandoned vehicles. “These are things that we had not historically been responsive to, and New Yorkers were begging us for help.”
The backlog does not appear to be tied to a sudden spike in enforcement, police records show.
Brooklyn has seen only about a 5% increase in arrests so far this year, rising from roughly 10,200 to 10,800 compared with the same period last year, according to NYPD statistics.
The Legal Aid Society case was so sensitive that organization officials met with Tisch last Thursday to discuss it at 1 Police Plaza.
“It shouldn’t take a writ,” Luongo told THE CITY Monday. “They explained that they saw some issues with the court and inefficiencies with courtrooms and construction.”
Luongo argued that the lower level offenses should not lead to arrests, and people should be given so-called desk appearance tickets instead.
“There’s a human cost: people who are in custody, on lower level cases like taking two seats on a subway, are in horrendous conditions,” she said. “Some of them may lose their shelter bed. There are consequences to being held.”
“There’s also a real financial cost to holding somebody who should not be held,” she added, referring to the need for more staff. “That means overtime.”