Hundreds of New Yorkers arrested during the protests against racist police violence are being held for longer than 24 hours in cramped Manhattan jail cells during a pandemic.
As of 9 a.m. Wednesday morning, there were still 379 people awaiting arraignment in Manhattan, several hundred of whom have been waiting longer than 24 hours, according to a spokesperson from the Office of Court Administration.
On Tuesday night, the Legal Aid Society filed an emergency writ of habeus corpus on behalf of these detainees. New Yorkers must legally be arraigned within 24 hours of their arrest. According to Legal Aid, at least one person arrested during the protests has been in custody for longer than 80 hours.
Corey Stoughton, Legal Aid's attorney-in-charge of Special Litigation, said that while some people in custody were being charged with felonies, many were arrested and detained for low-level offenses that usually merit a summons.
"Instead, the NYPD is choosing to arrest those people and bring them into overcrowded arraignments, exposing them to additional crowds and threatening their health," Stoughton told Gothamist. "It feels like a mystifying decision to escalate police encounters beyond what the law actually contemplates."
According to THE CITY, the NYPD has resorted to holding people arrested during the protests in police headquarters at 1 Police Plaza.
“Nobody was wearing masks inside One Police Plaza,” one detainee locked up there told the site. “So that was super dangerous.”
Well over 1,000 New Yorkers have been arrested during the protests this past week. The de Blasio administration's decision to arrest hundreds of people and detain them for longer than 24 hours is reminiscent of the thousands of arrests that took place under the Bloomberg administration during the 2004 Republican National Convention. New Yorkers were arrested en masse under the justification of "group probable cause" and then crowded into a fetid pier on the Hudson River. Those arrests were later ruled unconstitutional, and the city had to pay an $18 million settlement.
Now, these mass arrests are taking place during a global pandemic, and New Yorkers are being crammed into the Tombs awaiting arraignment.
"As a general matter these are spaces that are not being cleaned, that are already overcrowded, especially overcrowded by the standards of social distancing," Stoughton said. "This is really a dangerous situation."
The NYPD has not responded to our requests for comment, nor has the Mayor's Office.
Judges are supposed to review these kinds of emergency habeus corpus writs immediately, but that may take an inordinate amount of time: COVID-19 has forced defense attorneys to file a considerable amout of them in order to secure the release of their clients, Stoughton explained.
"The NYPD could release these people, absolutely," Stoughton said. "And they should be released. Especially the people who have been arrested for low-level offenses for which a ticket is supposed to be a appropriate response."
