Kew Gardens jail opponents fi le legal
challenge against plan to close Rikers
QNS/File
Discussions of bail reform roll-backs spike
tensions amongst lawmakers in Albany
TIMESLEDGER | QNS.COM | FEB. 27-MARCH 5, 2020 3
BY MAX PARROTT
Queens opponents of the contested
Kew Gardens jail have joined the list of
groups across the city who are mounting
legal challenges against the borough
based jail plan.
Queens Residents United (QRU) and
the Community Preservation Coalition
(CPC) jointly filed an article 78 petition
in New York County Supreme Court on
Feb. 18 that challenges the city’s plan
to replace the Rikers Island detention
complex with four borough-based jail
facilities.
The lawsuit alleges that the government
did not follow its own laws and
procedures conceiving and approving
its plan to replace Rikers. It seeks to
reverse the land-use approvals for the
borough-based jail system in Queens,
the Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan.
“The process for planning the
borough-based jail system was fatally
flawed from the outset,” said Joseph
Faraldo, spokesperson for QNU. “They
improperly combined the land-use review
for four massive borough-based
jails into a single, one-size-fits-all proposal
to accelerate approvals and avoid
meaningful public discussion and debate
over the scope, cost and implementation
of these projects.”
The petition, references the reversal
of the Inwood rezoning, as a precedent
where a large-scale land use ruling was
overturned in Supreme Court after the
judge found that the city had not followed
the City Environmental Quality
Review (CEQR) process.
In the case of the borough-based jail
plan, it argues that the city improperly
used the CEQR processed designed to
address an individual site to “to ram
through a Frankenstein-stitched, one
size fits all proposal” in four different
sites.
It argues that the city’s Environmental
Assessment Statement was not rigorous
enough in projecting the future
of the city’s detainee population. It also
says the environmental review process
did not sufficiently explore alternatives
to closing the Rikers facility.
The City Council approved its
sweeping $9 billion land use plan in
October, setting it up to close Rikers
Island by 2026.
Reach reporter Max Parrott by email
at mparrott@schnepsmedia.com or
by phone at (718) 260-2507.
BY MARK HALLUM
Advocates and lawmakers were attempting
to talk their counterparts in
government away from the ledge when
budget discussions broached rolling
back bail reform, which went into affect
Jan. 1.
The State Senate’s public protection
budget hearing Wednesday came up
with an alternate proposal while politicians
who had backed the reform in
2019 called on them to hold off.
All misdemeanors and non-violent
crimes are now exempt from bail, while
other offenses are still at a judges discretion,
something the Senate Majority
Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins said
would be re-evaluated on Wednesday.
The conclusion? Eliminate bail
altogether and allow judges to order
suspects to be held in jail considering
their criminal record or if they are
considered a flight risk.
The Legal Aid Society reacted to
the proposal as not only a betrayal,
but with conviction that it would place
New Yorkers in a tougher spot than
they had started in.
“The State Senate Majority’s proposal
puts politics over people by not
only rolling back the critical and longneeded
reforms that they endorsed and
championed only a few months ago, but
creating a much more regressive system
for pre-trial detention,” Legal Aid
Society said in a statement. “If enacted,
this proposal would dramatically increase
the number of people languishing
in jail who are presumed innocent.
It would create a system where even
innocent people would be incarcerated
with no chance of release, even if their
families and friends were able to post a
bond for them.”
“We’re asking during the budget
hearing today that our colleagues ask
the critical questions of the administration
and hear advocates’ voices.
My commitment is for absolutely no
rollbacks on bail and to move forward
until we actually get this roadmap,”
Queens Assemblywoman Catalina
Cruz said.
While bail reform has been a warcry
for progressives hoping to end features
of the justice system that reinforce
systemic racism, it has proven to
be divisive.
On Feb. 5, an Upstate judge brushed
off the bail reform bill claiming it was
unconstitutional on grounds of separations
of-powers, that legislators were
interfering with the authority of judges
to determine how accused criminals
are held accountable.
Mayor Bill de Blasio has worked
through his administration to end
mass incarceration at the city level by
pushing forward with the plan to close
Rikers Island in place of borough-based
jail facilities with a smaller capacity.
As such, he has been a supporter of the
bail reform laws passed in Albany, but
Wednesday voiced the position that not
every bill is perfect.
“I really want to emphasize, you
know, even the best pieces of legislation
sometimes have unintended consequences
that need to be assessed and
acted on. So, I do not want to go back
to the past,” de Blasio said. “There
were too many people languishing in
jail because they could not afford a
small amount of bail – that was surely
discriminatory. That was economic
discrimination on top of everything
else… We simply have to look at other
pieces of the equation. And I have
to say, judicial discretion, you could
argue – I can comfortably argue it
would have been a necessary change
even if there had never been a bail reform
law.”
The city’s plan to close Rikers and
the capacity of the new jails it is building
has been based in part on projected
capacity needs following the bail reform
bill as it currently is.
Reach reporter Mark Hallum by email
at mhallum@schnepsmedia.com
or by phone at (718) 260–4564.
Photo by Mark Hallum
/QNS.COM
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