The Law Office of Rankin & Taylor would like to speak with individuals penned in by the NYPD during an Occupy Wall Street protest on November 30, 2011, in the vicinity of the Sheraton Hotel located at Seventh Avenue and 53rd Street in Manhattan. A person who participated in the protest of President Obama’s visit to New York City and was penned in with other protestors and unable to leave the area for three hours approached Rankin & Taylor about a potential civil lawsuit.  Rankin & Taylor is now exploring bringing a federal class action lawsuit on behalf of these individuals detained by the NYPD.  If you were present at the protest and prevented from leaving by the NYPD, please contact Paula Segal, law clerk, at paula@drmtlaw.com or 212-226-4507.

Family of Mathieu Lefevre Sues NYPD for Withholding Crash Information

Streetsblog.org                                                                                                                        January 2, 2012

Brad Aaron

The family of Mathieu Lefevre has filed a lawsuit against the NYPD for refusing to release information related to the hit-and-run collision that killed the 30-year-old Brooklyn cyclist last October.

According to the complaint, filed in New York State Supreme Court on December 30 , NYPD denied a freedom of information request from Lefevre’s parents seeking records pertaining to the crash, on the grounds that the investigation is ongoing. The Lefevres appealed, citing their belief that the records in question are not exempt from disclosure under the law. NYPD failed to respond, effectively denying the appeal.

NYPD routinely denies access to information on deadly crashes, often based on the claim that releasing even the most rudimentary details would jeopardize crash investigations. The Lefevre lawsuit challenges that practice, based in part on the fact that NYPD has declared that no charges will be filed for Mathieu’s death.

The summary of the lawsuit, filed on behalf of the Lefevres by attorney Steve Vaccaro of Rankin & Taylor, reads in part:

NYPD admits that it possesses records requested by the Lefevres, but has stonewalled for nearly two months, refusing to disclose those records without a valid justification. The two grounds advanced by NYPD for withholding the records are completely lacking in merit.

First, NYPD asserts that it can withhold all records concerning Lefevre’s death, so long as its investigation of his death is still open. That is incorrect. FOIL exempts from disclosure only records the release of which would interfere with an ongoing investigation. NYPD does not suggest even the possibility of such interference.

Second, NYPD asserts that release of records concerning Lefevre’s death would jeopardize an impartial trial or adjudication. But NYPD has already announced there will be no criminal charges related to Lefevre’s death. Absent criminal charges, there is no right to a trial by jury, and therefore no chance of a tainted adjudication.

In December Vaccaro sent a letter to NYPD indicating that, according to officers involved in the case, the department’s Accident Investigation Squad has all but concluded that the truck driver who hit Lefevre, identified in the crash report as Leonardo Degianni, was unaware of the collision. The letter also points to conflicting accounts of the collision from NYPD, and says Vaccaro was told that the AIS lost vital evidence. (Disclosure: Vaccaro represented Streetsblog for our freedom of information request to obtain documents from CUNY related to the effort to erase the Prospect Park West bike lane.)

“The Lefevres seek only to learn the truth about the death of their son,” reads the suit summary. “NYPD’s stated reasons for hiding the truth from the Lefevres plainly lack merit.”

Steve Vaccaro is representing the parents of Mathieu Lefevre, a 30-year-old artist tragically killed by a truck driver while cycling in Williamsburg, in litigation against the NYPD to ensure a full and fair investigation of the crash.  Read about the NYPD’s handling of the investigation into Mathieu’s death in the article by Jim Dwyer of the New York Times below, and watch Transportation Alternatives’ Noah Budnick speak about the NYPD and the Lefevre case on “Inside City Hall,” linked here.

After a Son Is Killed, Facing a Police Runaround

By: Jim Dwyer
THE NEW YORK TIMES – Published December 6, 2011

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times
A so-called ghost bike stands in memory of Mathieu Lefevre, an artist from Canada who was killed on his bicycle in a crash in October.

The Lefevres — mother, father and one of their surviving sons — took the first flight to New York, spent the night with a friend, and the next morning went directly to the city morgue on Winthrop Street in Brooklyn. The second of the Lefevre sons, Mathieu, 30, had been run over by a truck two days earlier, just after midnight on Oct. 19, while he was biking home to Williamsburg. The truck did not stop.

His parents looked at pictures, then the remains, under a sheet. “The detective at the morgue told us to go to the 90th Precinct to do two things,” said Erika Lefevre, Mathieu’s mother. “A detective there would be able to give us an accident report, and we would be able to get our son’s personal effects.”

Before they left, the police detective at the morgue also told the Lefevres, who are from Canada, that they would need a lawyer; she gave them a business card. “We didn’t quite understand how the legal system worked in the United States,” Ms. Lefevre said. “We thought we would get a police report, that the information would be in the report, and we would proceed from there.”

“The detective gave us the card as a polite gesture,” she added. “I think she wanted to help us. We discarded it. We didn’t think this was a procedure we had to do.”

The 90th Precinct station house proved to be a House of No, as Ms. Lefevre described it: the family was told at the desk that there was no detective available to speak with them, that Mr. Lefevre’s property was not there and that no report on the accident was available.

So they waited.

“After some time elapsed, I called the detective at the morgue, who had given us her phone number in case we ran into problems,” Ms. Lefevre said. Eventually, a detective in the 90th Precinct explained that the person handling the investigation of their son’s death would not be back for several days. “The detective we saw said he had no access to the information, that they do not share files,” Ms. Lefevre said.

After four hours, she said, they left.

More people are killed in traffic accidents than by guns in New York City; death by motor vehicle is rarely treated as a crime. Someone died in city traffic every 29 hours, on average, from 2005 to 2009, according to a study by the city’s health and transportation departments. While New York has a stellar record compared with other big cities in the United States and has drastically improved in the last decade, the rate of traffic fatalities is far worse than in many major cities in Europe, according to another study, by the advocacy group Transportation Alternatives.

As a boy growing up in Alberta, in the countryside of western Canada, Mathieu Lefevre staged turtle Olympics, skied, built forts, played hockey and soccer. Everyone in the family was an avid cyclist. In Montreal, where Mr. Lefevre studied art, his work was hailed as witty and caustic, and it won honors.

In March 2010, he moved to New York and joined the 3rd Ward artists collective in East Williamsburg. “He wanted to establish his art internationally,” Ms. Lefevre said. “It was his dream. He loved living in New York. People have been so generous and compassionate to us.”

Five days after their visit to the 90th Precinct station house, they heard from a detective. Meanwhile, they read articles that quoted anonymous police sources stating, variously, that Mr. Lefevre had run a red light near the scene of the accident, at Meserole Street and Morgan Avenue, or that he had been passing a truck on the right as the truck was turning, making him a casualty of a right hook.

“I specifically asked about the red light, and the detective said there was no evidence of that,” Ms. Lefevre said.

On the night of the accident, the police found the vehicle they believed had hit Mr. Lefevre, parked on Scholes Street, two quick turns from the accident scene. It was a crane truck marked with the name Imperium Construction, according to an accident report, which identified the driver as Leonardo Degianni. Contacted on Tuesday, Mr. Degianni would not say if he had been behind the wheel. “It hasn’t been proven yet,” he said. “I have no comment.”

The authorities have said that the driver was not aware of striking Mr. Lefevre, although Steven Vaccaro, a lawyer hired by the Lefevres to get information, said that a diagram on the accident report showed that the truck hit the bicycle from behind. In any case, no charges have been filed.

“What happens to the driver is not of concern to us,” Ms. Lefevre said. “It is our greatest desire that we will finally learn the truth about the circumstances of our son’s death. We hope there will be a fair and unbiased investigation.”

A week after visiting the station house, the Lefevres were given their son’s belongings. They had been in the station house all along.

By: Colin Moynihan

The New York Times – August 29, 2011

On Fifth Avenue, somewhere between the University Club and Tiffany, Sojourner Hardeman sat before an empty storefront recently, displaying a cardboard sign that detailed her abilities as a typist and her familiarity with computer software.She advertised “very reasonable rates (expenses low),” adding, “all assistance appreciated.”

Her presence amid the high rents of Fifth Avenue may have surprised some, but then, Ms. Hardeman, 42, possesses what amounts to a Do Not Harass card.

After leaving a job last August and becoming homeless in September, Ms. Hardeman began panhandling on Fifth Avenue. One afternoon in March, she said, police officers arrested her there and detained her in a precinct station house before releasing her without charges.

The arrest led to a lawsuit, filed in May in Federal District Court in Manhattan. The lawsuit has not been resolved, but she has already taken a small measure of victory.

On Aug. 12, a federal judge in Manhattan approved a stipulation between the City of New York and Ms. Hardeman: the city agreed not to arrest or issue a summons to her, unless there was probable cause that she had broken the law. In addition, the city agreed that it would instruct officers in the Midtown North Precinct on the definition of the disorderly conduct statute by Sept. 15.

The stipulation came after Ms. Hardeman complained to the judge that she had been harassed several times by police officers after she filed the lawsuit.

Although it is a matter of standard law that no person should be arrested without probable cause, the fact that Ms. Hardeman managed to secure a judge-approved stipulation was something of a feat.

Ms. Hardeman referred to her style of solicitation as “passive panhandling,” involving little more than sitting quietly and letting her cardboard sign do the talking for her.

“I never broke the law,” she said, describing her time on Fifth Avenue.

There is a law against aggressive panhandling, but Ms. Hardeman’s lawyer, David B. Rankin, said other ways of asking for money were “clearly constitutionally protected.”

The lawsuit stemmed from an encounter in late March. Ms. Hardeman said two officers asked her for identification. She told them she had none, and the officers arrested her. She was taken to the Midtown North Precinct station house, where she remained for about five hours until the police released her without filing charges, she said.

Two months later, Ms. Hardeman filed a lawsuit asserting that the arresting officers had violated her 4th and 14th Amendment rights. Two days later, court papers said, a police sergeant called her on her cellphone asking to discuss the case. Ms. Hardeman said she referred the sergeant to her lawyer.

According to Ms. Hardeman’s complaint, officers approached her four times in July and ordered her to leave the spot in front of the empty storefront, at one point, saying: “You can’t be here. This is Fifth Avenue.”

Each time, Ms. Hardeman said, she refused to leave. On one occasion, officers handed her a disorderly conduct summons, saying she was blocking pedestrians. On another occasion, she said, officers briefly handcuffed her and placed her in the back of a police car before issuing another disorderly conduct summons.

“Midtown sidewalks are high-volume arteries, and blocking pedestrian traffic can cause safety issues,” Philip Frank, assistant corporation counsel at the city’s Law Department, said in a statement. “The stipulation simply indicates that Ms. Hardeman will not be arrested without probable cause. That’s the law for everyone.”

Ms. Hardeman denied that she had blocked pedestrians, saying that the recessed area she sits in is 20 inches deep and that she takes up only 10 inches of a 16-foot-wide sidewalk.

Sam J. Miller, the lead organizer with an advocacy group, Picture the Homeless, said he had heard many complaints from homeless people, accusing the police of arbitrarily issuing them disorderly conduct summonses.

“We have found hundreds of incidents of the police using disorderly conduct wrongly against homeless folks,” Mr. Miller said, adding that many of those charges were later dismissed or could not be substantiated.

Ms. Hardeman said she had been homeless off again on again for about 20 years. She said she quit a job as an assistant at a law firm last August, hoping to find something more fulfilling. A month later, she said, she lost a rented room in the South Bronx. For a while, she worked in Times Square, selling tickets to a comedy club. Then, in March, her resources and stamina depleted, she arrived on Fifth Avenue with a plastic milk crate and her sign.

On a good day there, she said, she can collect enough for necessities: a MetroCard, a rented storage space, the phone bill and some food.

Ms. Hardeman said she did not relish the disagreements with the police. But, she added, after losing her home in the Bronx, she was unwilling to walk away from her post on Fifth Avenue.

“I’m not planning for this to be a career,” she said as she sat on her crate, watching the passers-by. “I’m just trying to meet expenses.”

By: J. David Goodman

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Christian Hansen for The New York Times

One recent day, the lawyers there parsed bike-law issues, like “dooring zones” and when is it legally acceptable to ride outside a designated lane, while downstairs, each of their bikes were expertly locked to a scaffold along Broadway in TriBeCa.

The small firm is preparing to bring a class-action suit against New York City on behalf of cyclists over summons handed out for what it contends are phantom violations — bike behavior that it says is not illegal in the city. It is another sign that New York’s bike fights are moving from the streets to the courtroom.

When it comes to bike law, it seems, the wheels of justice no longer grind slowly. Since a ticketing blitz early this year, cyclists in New York have faced stepped-up police enforcement of red-light and other, less-obvious rules, like having adequate lights or not riding with earphones in both ears.

Add to that a highly publicized lawsuit challenging a bike lane along Prospect Park West in Brooklyn, thrown out by a judge last week, and bike law can seem like a growing opportunity for lawyers who make bikes their business.

In addition to Rankin & Taylor, the New York bike bar includes Adam D. White, a Manhattan lawyer who regularly commutes to work by bicycle and has represented injured cyclists, and Gideon Orion Oliver, an East Village lawyer who has represented cyclists involved with the Time’s Up rides that have frequently resulted in clashes with the police.

Bike rules are a surprisingly tangled area of the law. The city’s myriad regulations have confused unsuspecting riders and have occasionally tripped up even the police officers responsible for enforcing them.

Cyclists have reported being ticketed for equipment violations like riding without a bell. A bell is required by law — though an unscientific street survey indicated that, for many riders, their voices are their only warning systems. Others have been ticketed for riding without a helmet (not required for adults), and in one widely reported case, for riding with a purse hung over the handlebars. A Police Department spokesman later said the summons should not have been issued. The department did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment on the helmet violation.

Many cyclists are confused about their rights, which is where the new breed of bike lawyers comes in. One common question: are cyclists required to ride in a bike lane if one is available?

“There are 101 reasons that a cyclist might be outside of a bike lane,” said Steve Vaccaro, an avid cyclist and a lawyer at Rankin & Taylor. But aside from the obvious ones — to avoid a hazard or obstruction — it’s “highly contextual,” he added.

For example, it is legal to leave the bike lane to make a turn, and cyclists are allowed to prepare to make a turn by getting to the appropriate side of the street. But just where one can move out of the lane — 50 yards away, or two blocks, perhaps — is not specified.

While it is a good idea to be aware of the rules, he said, a rider would still have to explain the reason in court if ticketed.

That is Peter McCormick’s plan. He said he would contest in traffic court next month a ticket for running a red light in Central Park.

Bike lawyers were not optimistic about his chances. “In red-light cases, there’s not a lot you can do to get a cyclist off,” Roger Goldfinger, a lawyer at Rankin & Taylor, said. But he noted that cyclists should not pay the hefty surcharge, included in the total fine, that applies only to motor vehicles.

A spokesman for the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles confirmed that the fine indicated on a red-light ticket includes $80 in surcharges and fees that do not apply to bikes. Cyclists should pay only $190.

While the mundane details of traffic rules can create the most confusion, most cyclists do not need a lawyer to fight a ticket, but might need one if they are hurt by a vehicle

“For those people who think it can’t happen to them — I have a file of a person it happened to,” said Scott Charnas, a personal-injury lawyer who has represented many New York cyclists. He formed a relationship a decade ago with Bob Mionske, a West Coast bike lawyer and Bicycling Magazine columnist, who recommends Mr. Charnas to New York riders.

Mr. Charnas’s current clients include a delivery cyclist severely injured by a passing car. “In that case, the rider turned away to avoid the opening door and was then hit by a car,” he said. The deliveryman had a broken leg and other injuries, Mr. Charnas said, and will never be able to ride a bike again.

The accident highlights what can happen in the so-called dooring zone, the area next to a vehicle where its door could hit a passing cyclist. The lawyers at Rankin & Taylor also represent bike riders in personal-injury cases. But suing the city to make it more cycling-friendly, they said, could help prevent such injuries and ensure that cyclists are treated equally on the road.

“It’s not unrealistic to enforce traffic laws,” Mr. Vaccaro said. But he contends that the police have been issuing tickets based on sections of the state’s traffic law — for example, requiring riders to keep right or preventing them from riding two abreast — that he said do not apply in New York City. This is the basis of the class-action suit.

Paul J. Browne, the department’s chief spokesman, disputed that tickets were handed out in error. “Police officers write summonses for observed violations,” he said. “Although some cyclists are surprised to discover it, they must comply in most instances with the same rules that apply to motorists.”

Regardless of how the planned suit turns out, does taking a legalistic view of cycling sap its fun?

Not for Mr. Vaccaro. He recently quit a large corporate firm after 14 years to join the firm of David Rankin and Mark C. Taylor, two former Portland, Ore., bike messengers who kept their passion for biking after moving into the law.

“I’m doing it full speed ahead,” Mr. Vaccaro said of his bike work.

Mr. Rankin chimed in: “Of course, we’d all rather be outside.”

Rankin & Taylor attorney Robert Quackenbush was successful in getting this decision from New York Supreme Court Justice Sylvia Ash ordering the NYPD to produce additional records regarding prior misconduct by the officers involved in assaulting our client Joel Zabala.

The New York Law Journal covered the decision in this front page article:

Law Department Told to Review Assertion of Privilege for Police Records

New York Law Journal                                                July 15, 2011

Daniel Wise

A Brooklyn judge has ordered the Corporation Counsel’s Office to re-examine its practice of routinely asserting blanket privilege claims in defending police brutality cases.

That approach misapprehends the role of the court and burdens it with the “toilsome task” of deciding which documents should be subject to disclosure, said Supreme Court Justice Sylvia G. Ash (See Profile) in Zabala v. City of New York.

The ruling came in response to a request for records compiled by the New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) in a lawsuit brought by Joel Zabala, who claims he suffered brain damage from a police beating in 2009.

The Corporation Counsel’s Office made a “pro forma” objection to the disclosure of the entire file as it does in the majority of cases where sensitive personnel information may be involved, Justice Ash wrote.

“The Court’s role is to resolve issues,” she added, “not find issues to resolve.”

Finding New York City’s approach to be detrimental, Justice Ash directed the Law Department “to examine its practice and make appropriate changes.”

Mr. Zabala also sought the records of the New York City Police Department’s internal affairs bureau. He asked both agencies for files relating to any investigation of complaints against three officers concerning the use of excessive force in the last 10 years.

The review board has produced its records relating to substantiated instances of excessive use of force for Justice Ash’s inspection, but the internal affairs bureau is still gathering its information.

Justice Ash ordered the city to turn over for discovery, with one exception, all the review board records she has reviewed.

Richard D. Emery, a veteran plaintiffs’ civil rights litigator, said the city “routinely raises blunderbuss objections to block discovery of personnel records of officers against whom brutality claims are raised.”

But, he added, the responses of state judges vary, with some ordering the records to be produced in wholesale fashion and others conducting “a very focused examination to determine whether CCRB records have probative value.”

Some judges will consider that a review board finding that an officer was disrespectful to a citizen as probative of a brutality claim, while others will not, said Mr. Emery, a partner at Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady.

A Chase Acknowledged

According to his complaint, Mr. Zabala, knowing that he did not have a valid driver’s license, did not respond when a police car, with its lights flashing and siren on, tried to pull him over in Bushwick, Brooklyn, on the afternoon of March 8, 2009.

After being pursued for several blocks, Mr. Zabala stopped and exited his vehicle. Mr. Zabala alleged the police car pulled up alongside his Ford Explorer, hitting him and knocking him to the ground. Mr. Zabala claims he fled and was subsequently surrounded by officers as he attempted to hide under a parked car. He said one of the officers hit him three times with a radio and others kicked him, resulting in extensive facial injuries that resulted in his being hospitalized for eight days.

Mr. Zabala’s lawyer, Robert M. Quackenbush, said in an interview that the blows left his client with permanent brain damage, causing him to suffer seizures.

Asserting a federal civil rights claim under 42 U.S.C. §1983 and state tort claims, Mr. Zabala sued three NYPD officers and New York City.

In discovery, Mr. Quackenbush, of Rankin & Taylor, sought records compiled by internal affairs and the complaint review board relating to investigations over the last 10 years of claims that the three officers had used excessive force.

Internal affairs has yet to turn over its records to the city’s lawyers, but Justice Ash, who is in charge of tort cases against New York City filed in Brooklyn, ordered that civilian complaint review board records be given to Mr. Zabala within 45 days.

“It is not enough for the City to simply turn over the files to the Court, which usually consist of hundreds of pages of documents, and expect the Court to go through each document to determine what information is privileged, highly sensitive or not subject to disclosure,” the judge wrote.

The sole exception she made in her order was for 11 pages from a review board file relating to a complainant’s medical records.

New York City and the three officers were represented by Assistant Corporation Counsel Katherine M. Frank. An office spokeswoman said the decision is being reviewed.

Alex Wilson/Getty – FILE PHOTO

A masseuse claims she was forced to clean a toilet and then released without any charges.

A masseuse arrested in a Staten Island spa raid claims cops made her clean an overflowing toilet in the stationhouse – before releasing her without even a summons.

Mom-of-three Gabrielle Vignolini is suing the city and plainclothes cops who were apparently looking for illicit sexcapades at the Morounfola Beauty Spa last August.

Vignolini, 31, contends in a federal complaint that a week before the spa’s public opening, she was hired to give massages to friends and family during a dry run.

A plainclothes cop barged in and asked, “Can I get some?” her complaint states.

He was asked to leave but returned later with uniformed officers.

Vignolini says she was performing a “chakra rock treatment on a fully clothed female friend” when she and the owner were arrested.

The women were held for 22 hours in a filthy cell flooded by a clogged toilet at the 120th Precinct stationhouse, she claims.

A female cop told Vignolini she wasn’t leaving until she cleaned up the mess, the complaint says. She says she did and was cut loose, along with the owner.

“The Police Department and its officers are under tremendous pressure to keep arrest numbers up, and so we see a lot of these arrests have no basis,” Vignolini’s lawyer Mark Taylor [Editor's Note: Mark Taylor was incorrectly identified as "Michael Taylor" in the NY Daily News] said yesterday.

A police spokeswoman said the district attorney declined to prosecute Vignolini for unlicensed massaging. Her lawyer says she has a license.

Republished from the NY Daily News.

Why Composting Still Vexes New York

Wall Street Journal                                April 26, 2011

By Aaron Rutkoff

New York generates no small amount of food-based garbage. The local rats seem quite capable of eating their fill. But the biggest city in the U.S. has had no luck implementing a large-scale composting regime.

A story in Tuesday’s Journal looks at a logistical hurdle hampering the biggest city-sponsored composting effort so far. With no local facility capable of handling the tons of kitchen scraps collected at seven of the city’s 54 Greenmarkets, the pilot program is forced to truck New Yorkers’ decaying food waste some 125 miles to Delaware — hardly the greenest of all possible outcomes.

Transportation costs eat into composting funds: GrowNYC, the nonprofit overseeing the composting, spends about one third of its budget moving coffee grounds, veggie bits and other leftovers out of state. And small-scale composting centers like the Lower East Side Ecology Center are at capacity.

Portland, Toronto and San Francisco have also been forced to truck material collected in municipal composting to remote locations, but those cities have surpassed New York by organizing citywide collection systems. For the Big Apple, the push for more comprehensive composting tends to open cans of worms.

First, there’s the gross-out factor. Robert Lange, director of waste reduction at the New York City Sanitation Department, warned municipal officials in Vancouver last month that apartment dwellers will resist composting programs. As the Vancouver Sun reported:

Lange noted it’s difficult to get buyin from the 65 per cent of multi-family residences in the city, mainly because they have no place to store recyclables, let alone compost, and can dump the trash anonymously down garbage chutes with little chance of being caught. “Though we have made tremendous strides, we’ve reached a plateau in the participation of our residents,” he said. “There is a desire but the convenience is compromised.

“Convenience is the overriding factor. Recycling is not easy for a lot of people, especially those living in multi-family residences.”

That knowledge comes from no small amount of experience. A series of experiments conducted in the 1990s found that, even when you can get New Yorkers to participate, collection is inefficient, impractical and very expensive — so much so that sanitation officials concluded a centralized system probably wouldn’t work in New York City.

Even entrepreneurial startups developing composting schemes outside of the city bureaucracy have been stymied. Adam Gordon is part of the New York Compost Company, a group that raised seed money through Kickstarter, a crowd-sourcing website, to take the expensive-to-operate garbage trucks out of the equation. The idea: build special bicycles to haul food scraps from participating restaurants directly to the farmers who sell produce at New York’s Greenmarkets and to community-supported agriculture groups. The farmers would then bring the compostable material back to their farms.

The bicycles have been built and restaurants have signed on, but Gordon said his group hasn’t been able to launch the pilot program because of regulatory hurdles. “As our lawyers have told us, to pick up from businesses you have to get permits,” he said. “And it’s just so exorbitant that we haven’t been able to do it.”

Even if Gordon’s group secures the permits needed to pick up scraps from restaurants, other city rules governing the storage of waste make their program “all but impossible to do in the city,” Gordon said. “We thought we could just get moving with it, but it has been one hurdle after another.”

Still, there is hope that things might change. The latest version of the Bloomberg administration’s PlaNYC, released last week, outlines specific composting policies that the city should embrace and acknowledges that “participation in commercial composting efforts remains limited.”

“They are aware of the problems,” Gordon said of city officials. “The composting infrastructure in the city is sorely lacking. The rules and regulations need to change.”

Corrections & Amplifications: Composting material is collected at seven of New York City’s 54 Greenmarkets. An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that all Greenmarkets participate in the composting pilot program.

Andrew Keshner

New York Law Journal

April 13, 2011

A bicyclist blown over by a gust of wind produced by a helicopter landing nearby may continue with his personal injury suit against the operator of the heliport, a state judge has ruled.

In denying the summary judgment motion of heliport operator Air Pegasus, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Carol R. Edmead  said, “Viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to plaintiff and drawing all reasonable inferences in his favor, the Court finds that there are triable issues of fact as to whether Air Pegasus breached its duty to maintain the Heliport in a safe condition, and whether that breach proximately caused plaintiff’s injuries.”

Michael Strasmich was riding south on a bike path along Manhattan’s West Street on March 27, 2007, when the gust of wind from a landing helicopter at the West 30th Street Heliport blew him off his bike. He was hit by a cyclist passing on his left. Mr. Strasmich, 56, separated his shoulder in the collision and required surgery.

According to his attorney, David Rankin, the landing aircraft, which sat 12 passengers and two pilots, was being used to transport executives from the East Side to the West Side. He said the aircraft’s top blade was approximately 30 feet from Mr. Strasmich at the time of the incident.

An expert retained by the plaintiff, Elias Panides, a Columbia University professor, estimated in an affidavit that the wind from the landing could be up to 30 miles an hour.

Mr. Rankin, of Rankin & Taylor, maintained the heliport could have chosen to land the helicopter either on a landing pad located on a nearby pier or a barge on the Hudson River.

In September 2007, Mr. Strasmich sued Air Pegasus along with a number of entities to determine which one operated the helicopter that caused the wind blast. He sought $300,000 in damages. One company settled and one defaulted, said Mr. Rankin.

Air Pegasus argued that while it advised pilots about wind conditions, nearby air traffic and which landing pads to use, the heliport did not control landing helicopters or their pilots, according to the decision. Air Pegasus also noted that it was not involved in the creation of the heliport or the bike path, which had been built by the New York State Department of Transportation and the Hudson River Park Trust.

Justice Edmead said in her decision in Strasmich v. Liberty Helicopters,112243-2007, that Air Pegasus did not establish, as a matter of law, that it was not negligent in failing to assist the helicopter at the time of the accident.

She acknowledged that the heliport’s permits and procedure manuals do not explicitly require Air Pegasus to provide information to pilots about conditions. Nevertheless, she said, “Air Pegasus was admittedly responsible for advising the pilot about wind conditions, and to this extent, Air Pegasus played a part in the manner of the helicopter’s approach and landing.”

Mr. Strasmich complained that the heliport had not erected a “blast fence” to diminish the force of winds from landing helicopters. The heliport operator said it added plastic mesh to an existing chain-link fence between the launching pad and the roadway after the March 2007 accident and built an eight-foot-high concrete barrier in April 2009, but argued it had not been required to build protective barriers.

Justice Edmead found that the heliport’s permit did not prevent it from building such a barrier. Instead, it precluded the company from building activity without written consent from the Department of Transportation.

“While none of the sections of the Permit cited by plaintiff expressly create an obligation for Air Pegasus to construct such a [fence], the absence of such a provision does not end the inquiry,” the decision stated.

Air Pegasus argued it was “not unusual” to experience wind gusts over 30 miles per hour in New York City in March, but Justice Edmead called the claim “conclusory” in light of the plaintiff’s expert affidavit from Mr. Panides, who said, “Wind gusts exceeding 30 mph are possible since the flow is strongly turbulent and unsteady.”

The judge however, narrowed some of the claims against Air Pegasus, for example, she dismissed claims that the heliport permitted construction in a way allowing gusts to occur, noting that Air Pegasus was not involved in its building.

Mr. Rankin called the ruling “well reasoned and thorough.”

Air Pegasus, located on West 30th Street and 12th Avenue, was represented by James A. Gallagher of Gallagher & Faller in Garden City. Mr. Gallagher did not know whether his client would appeal the decision or opt to proceed to trial, which has been scheduled for July.

“We disagree with the judge, but respect and appreciate her opinion,” he said.

According to Justice Edmead, the operator of the helicopter, CSC Transport, is scheduled to file a summary judgment motion on April 19. Douglas Shearer, of McKeegan & Shearer, represented CSC Transport and did not return a call for comment.

@|Andrew Keshner

After receiving humiliating treatment at the hands of the NYPD Shawn Schenck has retained Rankin & Taylor in seeking justice.  The Daily New reports;

Cops conducted illegal and humiliating body cavity search on me, Bronx man claims in suit

BY Rocco Parascandola
DAILY NEWS POLICE BUREAU CHIEF

Wednesday, February 2nd 2011, 4:00 AM

A Bronx man wrongly accused of dealing drugs at a bodega is suing the city because cops conducted an illegal body cavity search, his lawyer said Tuesday.

Shawn Schenck, 47, said he walked into the Green Valley Deli and Pizza on Sept. 15 to buy a pack of cigarettes.

Five cops burst into the store and arrested Schenck and four other men. One of the cops dragged Schenck outside and slipped on a rubber glove, the suit – expected to be filed Wednesday – charges.

“Where’s it at?” one of the officers reportedly asked. “Where’s it at?”

The cop reached inside Schenck’s jeans, felt around his testicles and then probed his anus, the suit claims.

“You’re violating me!” Schenck recalled screaming. “You’re violating me!”

The humiliating search happened in front of about 40 people, Schenck said. Police didn’t have a search warrant, which is required for body cavity probes.

Cops denied the rectal search, saying cops only frisked him.

Police didn’t find any drugs on Schenck after he was busted at 158th St. and Park Ave. Still, he was in custody for three hours.

Deputy Inspector Kim Royster, a police spokeswoman, said a supervisor reviewed surveillance footage from the bodega that proved the married Bronx father of two wasn’t part of the drug crew. Schenck was then released, Royster said.

Schenck, who served time in the late 1990s for a drug conviction, said no one deserves such treatment.

“After what happened, people were looking at me sideways,” he said. “People were cracking jokes for like two months. This thing gave me a whole bunch of anxiety.”

The NYPD’s Patrol Guide was revised in 2008 after the state Court of Appeals court ruled police must have a warrant to execute the invasive searches – barring an emergency. That case involved a Harlem drug suspect. The indictment against him was dismissed.