Coverage:

•   New York Post – Stillborn-tot mom’s Potter’s Field suit
•   USA Today – N.Y. doctor sues for right to visit stillborn’s grave
•  The Journal News – Doctor sues for right to visit stillorns’ grave in Potter’s Field on Hart Island

Colin Moynihan of The New York Times reports:

The New York City Law Department has quietly adopted a practice of withholding from public filings how much it pays to settle most federal court cases filed against the city or its employees.

Those amounts were once routinely included in documents placed into courthouse files, but about three years ago the agency began telling plaintiffs’ lawyers that the figures would be omitted from court filings as a condition of settling labor and employment cases. The policy was broadened in November to include lawsuits filed against members of the Police Department.

Law Department officials, who discussed the policy but did not agree to be quoted by name, acknowledged that in a majority of federal court cases that it settles, courthouse records no longer disclose how much the city paid out. The officials said that settlement amounts, however, remain available to those who file a Freedom of Information request or call the Law Department.

“We freely provide information about settlements upon request,” a Law Department spokeswoman, Kate O’Brien Ahlers, said. “That cooperation has always been forthcoming and will always be forthcoming.”

Some plaintiffs’ lawyers and civil liberties lawyers criticized the shift, saying the assistance of the city was now required to obtain information that could once be obtained without its knowledge or permission. Several of those lawyers contended that while the practice of keeping settlement amounts confidential was common in private practice, the city had a greater obligation to operate transparently.

“It is every New Yorker’s right to know how their tax dollars are being spent,” said David B. Rankin, a lawyer who recently handled an unlawful-force case against the police in which the settlement was not disclosed in court filings. “And it is particularly important to know how that money is being spent when it is being used to compensate the victims of misconduct by our Police Department.”

Mr. Rankin said city lawyers had been making settlements contingent on acceptance of the new practice, adding that the department had apparently been “quite firm” on that point.

The article continues to quote other civil rights litigators as well as the City’s Law Department about the policy shift.  Read the entire article at the New York Times.

Now, in his civil rights lawsuit, a Brooklyn federal judge has ruled (link to decision)  it is plausible that the NYPD’s practices of mass arrests at demonstrations and false swearing to cover up bad arrests caused Osterhoudt’s unlawful arrest. The case was recently featured in the New York Law Journal (pay site).

Osterhoudt Video

 Video courtesy of YouTube

As described by Judge Raymond J. Dearie of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York:

On election night in November 2008, enthusiastic crowds gathered in the streets of Williamsburg, Brooklyn to await the election results. Plaintiff R.J. Osterhoudt and his roommate had just arrived when they allegedly saw NYPD officers picking fights and indiscriminately arresting bystanders. Plaintiff, swept up in the mass arrests, was charged with obstructing government administration, resisting arrest, and disorderly conduct and detained for 17 hours before his charges were adjourned in contemplation of dismissal. Plaintiff sues them officers and City under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, alleging that he was unlawfully arrested as part of the NYPD’s custom of sweeping up arrestees at demonstrations without making individualized determinations of probable cause. To prop up these bad arrests, the NYPD, according to plaintiff, customarily encourages officers to swear false criminal complaints and discourages honest officers from reporting misconduct.

In support of his allegations that the NYPD routinely sweeps up innocent people at demonstrations, Osterhoudt pointed to illegal mass arrests at the 2004 Republican National Convention, Critical Mass bike rides and protests against the World Economic Forum. The City moved to dismiss the claim. They lost, and the case is now proceeding.

On the evening of March 15, Shauna Francis called 311 looking for some information. She wanted to call an ambulance for her 30-year-old sister, Shereese, but wasn’t impressed by the quality of care at Queens General, the nearest hospital. Shauna wanted to know if she could ask the ambulance to take Shereese to a Long Island hospital.

The 311 operator told Shauna she would have to take that question up with the EMTs when they arrived and asked Shauna about the nature of the problem. Shauna explained that Shereese, a person with schizophrenia whose illness was well-controlled by her medication, had been refusing to take her meds for some time, and the family wanted doctors at a hospital to help persuade her to resume taking them.

The operator transferred Shauna to a 911 dispatcher, who listened to Shauna’s story and promised to send someone over. Shauna hung up and traveled the short distance from her home to the small, single-story house in Rochdale where her mother lived with Shereese.

As she drew up to the driveway, she saw a police cruiser had already arrived, and four officers were approaching the front door. That wasn’t unusual: On other occasions when the family had called an ambulance for Shereese, police often arrived along with the EMTs. Assuming an ambulance was probably on its way, Shauna led the officers into the house, where her mother, Eleen, explained that Shereese was in her bedroom in the basement.

What happened in that basement after the police went downstairs to talk to Shereese isn’t fully known. Shauna and Eleen saw and heard some of what transpired, but not everything. Citing an ongoing internal investigation, the police department isn’t commenting.

Continue reading at the Village Voice

Three Occupy Wall Street protesters announced today that they are suing the New York Police Department in federal court over officers’ use of pepper spray on marchers last September 24.

Two of the plaintiffs, Damien Crisp and Julie Lawler, were sprayed by Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna, whose actions were documented on the widely circulated video seen above. You can read their complaints here and here.Chelsea Elliot and Jeanne Mansfield, two other protesters sprayed by Bologna while already kettled by police have already filed suit against the police and the city.

A third plaintiff, Kelly Hanlin, was sprayed by police on the same march while attempting to photograph the violent arrest of another demonstrator. Hanlin’s complaint alleges that he was pepper-sprayed “in direct retaliation for both his participation in Occupy Wall Street and for videotaping unlawful police conduct occurring in public.”

None of the three demonstrators were ever charged in relation to the events of that day.

The suits come on the heels of last week’s scathing report from the Protest and Assembly Rights Project, which documented 130 separate incidents in which the NYPD allegedly used excessive force on Occupy Wall Street protesters.

The three lawsuits filed today cite the report in arguing that police violence against protesters is widespread.

“These incidents illustrate the ways in which the police department has resorted to aggressive intimidation tactics and physically brutal tactics in order to discourage people from demonstrating here in New York,” Mark Taylor, the protesters’ lawyer, told the Voice today.

The protesters are seeking compensation and punitive damages, as well as injunctive relief: Specifically, they are asking the court to require the city to develop an official policy governing police response to demonstrations. They want the courts to oversee the city’s implementation of the policy and its creation of a system to handle civilian complaints.

The video shows a police officer striding toward a young man standing on a platform at the 45th Street subway station in Brooklyn. A few seconds later, the officer pats him down. Shortly afterward, the young man appears to fidget against a wall and the officer slams him to the ground, ripping a subway ad from the wall in the process. The officer does it again, then puts the young man in a headlock and handcuffs him.

That scene was captured by David Galarza, a local activist, who said he recorded it last Thursday night. At a news conference on Thursday in Brooklyn, Mr. Galarza and other local activists said the officer’s confrontation with the young man, Sean Pagan, 19, was another example of the police’s mistreatment of the predominantly Hispanic and Asian residents of Sunset Park.

David B. Rankin, Mr. Pagan’s attorney,

insisted that his client had complied with the officer’s search. “There was no reason for this officer to do this invasive of a search at all,” he said. “From that overreaching, even just a twitch results in two body slams to the floor.”

When Bell saw three NYPD officers walk past him last August, he saluted them with his middle finger. A fourth officer saw Bell’s gesture and placed him under arrest. Bell was taken to a police precinct and held for several hours before being released with a summons charging him with disorderly conduct. Represented by the New York Civil Liberties Union in criminal court, the charge was dismissed when the arresting officer failed to show up to court.

Bell’s lawsuit – filed in Manhattan’s federal district court – alleges the officers violated his constitutional right to dissent, including the right to raise his middle finger at police officers.

Claims like Bell’s are not unique, as courts have repeatedly recognized that raising the middle finger is speech which is protected by the First Amendment. Bell’s case follows on the heels of a federal lawsuit against a Pittsburgh police officer who arrested a man after he flipped off the officer, resulting in a judgment against the officer and a $50,000 settlement to the plaintiff.

Press coverage of Mr. Bell’s civil rights lawsuit:
DNAinfo.com New York: “Man Arrested for Giving Cops the Finger Says it Was a Joke“
DNAinfo.com New York: “Man Sues for Right to Give Cops the Finger After Village Arrest”
Gothamist
New York Magazine
New York Post
The Star-Ledger

Shereese Francis (via Facebook via Village Voice)

by Nick Pinto.

On March 15, Shereese Francis had a fight with her mother and became increasingly emotionally distraught. Francis, 30, lived at home in Queens, wasn’t taking the medication prescribed for her schizophrenia. Her sister called 311, hoping to get Shereese to a hospital.

Continue reading at the Village Voice

Read more at The New York Times

photo: Todd Heisler/The New York Times

“We came to express our views at a place where the President might see us, and were detained for hours as if we had committed a crime,” said John Rivera, one of the class action plaintiffs, who was a member of the Civil Service Employees Association, a prominent New York Union, for 20 years and is a Bushwick, Brooklyn resident. Mr. Rivera has been demonstrating in New York City since the 1980s. His first political action was protesting the Soviet Embassy after the shooting of an American soldier in Germany. He says he has never experienced a detention like this one.

“What happened to me, and my fellow protesters, was an eye opener. We were corralled like farm animals.” Mr. Rivera had been spending time in Liberty Park since September 19, 2011.

Though the New York Civil Liberties Union was successful in getting the NYPD to agree to restrictions on the use of barricades in 2008, the current suit alleges that the police department has violated those guidelines as well as the US Constitution.

“Under Commissioner Kelly the NYPD has considered itself above any restrictions when it comes to political protests, even restrictions it agrees to in front of a federal judge. We will look for judicial oversight of these tactics in order to defend New Yorker’s rights,” said attorney Mark Taylor.

“We were demonstrating peacefully and then with no warning we were detained for hours,” describes Jonathan Jetter, another of the plaintiffs, who is a professor at the State University of New York at Purchase and the owner of a midtown Manhattan-based music business. “We were denied access to legal representation and the press. I’ve taken part in many protests and this was the most chilling police response I’ve yet encountered,” he continued. Mr. Jetter lives in Queens.

“This felt like an attempt to scare us from participating in future protests,” explained Phoebe Berg of Brooklyn, another class representative. “I hate the fact that I can’t help but take into account the real possibility of being detained again, not allowed access to a water/food or a restroom for possibly hours, during the May Day General Strike and other future actions.”

Berg v Nypd – Complaint Filed

For a video of the events of November 30, 2011, go to:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hCTVwTLT3o

Press coverage of the events of November 30, 2011:
Josh Harkinson, They’re Holding Us Hostage, MOTHER JONES (Dec. 1, 2011), available at http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/11/occupy-wall-street-free-speech-zones-obama-protest- video

Matt Flegenheimer, Occupy Protestors Mobilize for Obama’s Visit, N.Y. TIMES CITY ROOM BLOG (Nov. 30, 2011), available at http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/ occupy-protesters-mobilize-for-obamas-visit

Joe Pompeo, Reporters Covering Occupy Wall Street Protest Outside Obama Fund-Raiser Say Police Barred Them, CAPITAL NEW YORK (Dec. 1, 2011), available at http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2011/12/4378810/reporters-covering-occupy- wall-street-protest-outside-obama-fund-raise

John Del Signore, Protestors Blast ‘One Percent President’ Obama During $2.4M Visit to NYC, GOTHAMIST (Dec. 1, 2011), available at http://gothamist.com/2011/ 12/01/protesters_blast_one_percent_presid.php

Press Contact:
Mark Taylor
Rankin & Taylor, PLLC
mark@drmtlaw.com
office: 212-226-4507

###

Press Coverage of Berg v. NYPD

Nick Pinto, On the Eve of May Day, a Raft of Suits Against the NYPD Over Treatment of Protesters, Village Voice (Apr. 30, 2012), available at http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2012/04/on_the_eve_of_m.php#more

Repost of Rankin & Taylor Press Release, Occupy the Bronx (Apr. 30, 2012), available at http://occupythebronx.org/2012/04/demonstrators-request-injunction-restricting-nypds-use-of-metal-barricades/

Colin Moynihan, Protesters Accuse Police of Improperly Using Barricades, The New York Times (Apr. 30, 2012), available at http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/30/protesters-accuse-police-of-improperly-using-barricades/

John Del Signore, Occupy Protesters Sue NYPD For Forcing Them Into Free Speech Cages, Gothamist (April 30, 2012), available at http://gothamist.com/2012/04/30/second_ows_lawsuit.php

Ruthann Robson, Complaint Against NYPD for Barricading OWS Protesters, Constitutional Law Prof Blog (April 30, 2012), available at http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/conlaw/2012/04/complaint-against-nypd-.html