MANHATTAN (CN) - New York City’s failure to adopt bail reforms two years after a report labeled the system “deranged” has sparked a federal class action by three men caught in the crossfire.
Vice News used the language in question in August 2015, and the Center for Court Innovation shed light on the delays and improperly extended detentions tied to what it called the city's “confusing and perplexing" bail system four months later.
Still waiting for enforcement of the recommendations that report put forward, former detainees James Lynch, Lloyd Jones and Baron Spencer say they want to represent a class of the thousands of presumptively innocent detainees who were jailed for hours or days over the years, “as these well-documented problems went unaddressed … in violation of court orders entitling them to release upon posting bail.”
The men filed their federal class action Wednesday in Manhattan, alleging false imprisonment and violations of civil rights.
They note that the concept of bail is simple but its practice in New York is “byzantine and inhumane.”
“Every day and night, friends, family members, and charitable organizations present themselves at New York City Department of Correction facilities with cash, cashier’s checks, and money orders, asking to pay bail for a presumptively innocent person who is in jail — and they are turned away,” the complaint states. “They are told that the computers or the fax machines are not working; that the responsible staff is not available; that the person is not ‘eligible’ to be released on bail because he or she is in the midst of the day-long ordeal of being processed for admission to a jail facility; or another of an endless supply of excuses. They are told to come back after lunch; to come back after the next shift change; to come back the next day.”
It should take mere minutes, hours at most, to release a detainee once his bail is paid, according to the complaint.
“Instead, detainees often languish for a day or more after their bail has been posted — even though they are, by judicial order, entitled to release, and there is no lawful basis for continued restraints on their liberty,” the complaint states. “Such overdetentions are, as courts across the country have long held, unconstitutional.”
City officials effectively admitted, in their adoption of a bail-efficiency law this past June, that a bail payment should trigger the release of a detainee within five hours, according to the complaint.
“The city nonetheless detained members of the class for many hours or days beyond the three to five hour threshold, without any legitimate governmental necessity,” the complaint states.
“These overdetentions resulted from the city’s unconstitutional policies, practices, usages and/or customs and from its unlawful deliberate indifference to the constitutional rights of class members.”
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