Public and Appellate Defenders call on NYC District Attorneys for a Full, Transparent and Independent Audit of the NYPD Latent Print Section
December 7, 2023
Contact:
Brian Schatz
Director of Community-Based Initiatives & External Affairs
press@queensdefenders.org
***FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE***
Public and Appellate Defenders call on NYC District Attorneys for a Full, Transparent and Independent Audit of the NYPD Latent Print Section
Attorneys Demand Answers on the NYPD’s Delayed Notification of Fingerprint Misidentification that May Have Contributed to Wrongful Convictions and Due Process Violations
(NEW YORK, NY) – The Legal Aid Society, Appellate Advocates, The Bronx Defenders, Brooklyn Defender Services, Center for Appellate Litigation, Innocence Project of New York, Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem, New York County Defender Services, Office of the Appellate Defender, Queens Defenders released a letter sent to all five New York City district attorneys calling for a full, transparent, and independent audit of the New York City Police Department’s (NYPD) Latent Print Section. The groups also called for a comprehensive list of all cases in which evidence was either examined or verified by the fingerprint examiners involved in the erroneous fingerprint analysis back in 2015.
The joint defender and advocate letter comes in response to a near-decade delay by the NYPD’s Latent Print Section to formally disclose that one of its fingerprint examiners erroneously matched an individual’s fingerprint to a crime-scene fingerprint back in 2015 while two other examiners verified the misidentification.
Indeed, the NYPD’s disclosure in a letter dated July 13, 2023, is addressed only to prosecutors. Local DAs attempted to notify affected defendants, but the NYPD’s July 13, 2023 letter failed to identify which cases were affected by this misidentification event or the extent of the error’s impact on the operation and reliability of the Latent Print Unit.
Defenders and advocates expressed deep concerns about the lack of transparency surrounding the fingerprint misidentification, which undermines the criminal legal system and the constitutional due process rights and right to a fair trial of the accused. Of particular concern is one of the examiners who verified the erroneous identification went on to become a trainer for the NYPD Latent Print Section and provided misleading testimony in at least two trials.
“Every person has the right to a fair trial where they are presumed innocent until proven guilty.” Said Lori Zeno, Executive Director & Founder of Queens Defenders. “The NYPD’s delay in identifying and sharing information related to cases where examiner error led to misidentification or tainting of a police investigation is deeply disturbing and undermines the integrity of the legal system. Further, the allegations of pervasive laboratory failures and cheating on OCME exams suggests a broken forensic collection system that cannot be relied upon to determine the outcome of an individual’s case. We are calling on the NYPD to immediately provide details of affected cases so that any miscarriages of justice can be expeditiously remedied. Queens Defenders is committed to defending and protecting all our clients who may have been impacted by these unjust systems and processes.”
“The NYPD’s disclosure letter reveals next to nothing about how this misidentification may have negatively impacted any number of our client’s cases,” said Jenny S. Cheung, Supervising Attorney of the DNA Unit at The Legal Aid Society. “It is unacceptable that even one client would have their right to a fair trial jeopardized as a result of the lack of disclosure of all pertinent case-related information to defendants and their counsel. We ask the DA’s Office to provide answers to the litany of questions raised by this disclosure letter, and promptly make all information available to attorneys and their clients.”
“New York State is third in the country in wrongful convictions, and it is incidents like this belated disclosure of a 2015 latent print misidentification that demonstrate why,” said Mariah Martinez, DNA & Forensics Unit Attorney at New York County Defender Services. “City District Attorneys must do better to mitigate and prevent wrongful convictions, starting by disclosing all of the cases that involved Detectives Joe Martinez, Gerald Rex, or Edward Sanabria, as required by the U.S. Constitution. This information potentially affects thousands of clients who these officers were associated with and raises the deeply concerning possibility of a wrongful conviction. Our clients deserve a complete accounting of process being used to evaluate each and every one of these cases to ensure that justice is delivered.”
“These recent disclosures show once again that NYC’s criminal legal system is optimized for securing convictions, not doing justice,” said Mark Zeno, Deputy Director at the Center for Appellate Litigation. “The means for determining who may have been unjustly convicted due to these chronic systemic failures within NYC’s law-enforcement apparatus are entirely within the government’s control, yet NYPD and the District Attorneys’ Offices have refused to identify those persons who may to-this-day be wrongfully incarcerated due to these failures. Our clients—and New York’s citizens—deserve better.”
“As defenders we are deeply concerned about the lack of transparency and failure to provide complete information. New Yorker’s deserve a more accountable criminal legal system that does not shield unjust results from correction. The behavior of the New York District Attorney’s office and the NYPD severely undermines the administration of justice. We join the call for a full, transparent, and independent audit of the New York City Police Department’s (NYPD) Latent Print Section,” said Caprice Jenerson, President & Attorney-in-Charge of Office of the Appellate Defender.
“When similar forensic laboratory errors occurred in other cities, such as Washington, D.C. or Houston, their departments engaged in rigorous, independent audits of their laboratories, allowing them to identify and correct systemic problems, ameliorating past failures of justice and preventing future harms,” said Elizabeth Daniel Vasquez, Director of the Science and Surveillance Project at Brooklyn Defenders. “In New York, eight years of secrecy and avoidance of accountability has allowed the problems within NYPD’s forensic lab to fester. After so much time, we, as defenders, are unable to identify the many cases and people impacted by this misidentification event and other scientific failures or misconduct emanating from it. The people of New York City deserve transparency, accountability, and scientific rigor. In this case, sunlight is truly the best disinfectant.”
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Read the full letter here.
New York City Public Defenders File Amicus Brief in Support of the Appointment of a Federal Receiver Over NYC Jails in Nunez v. City of New York
December 4, 2023
Contact:
Daniel Ball, Brooklyn Defender Services, (dball@bds.org)
Anthony Chiarito, The Bronx Defenders, (achiarito@bronxdefenders.org)
Emily Whitfield, Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem,
(ewhitfield@neighborhooddefender.org)
Lupe Todd-Medina, New York County Defender Services, (LToddmedina@nycds.org)
Brian Schatz, Queens Defenders (bschatz@queensdefenders.org)
Michael Orey, New York University Law School, michael.orey@nyu.edu
***FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE***
New York City Public Defenders File Amicus Brief in Support of the Appointment of a Federal Receiver Over NYC Jails in Nunez v. City of New York
(NEW YORK, NY) – The Bronx Defenders, Brooklyn Defender Services, Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem, New York County Defender Services, and Queens Defenders, with co-counsel NYU School of Law’s Civil Rights in the Criminal Legal System Clinic, filed an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs’ motion for contempt and appointment of a federal receiver over New York City jails in Nunez v. City of New York.
Eight years after the court entered its consent decree mandating significant reforms to reduce the use of excessive force in New York City jails, the people held in those jails are increasingly subject to intolerable and sometimes deadly violence and dysfunction. Amici submitted the brief in support of the plaintiffs’ application for the appointment of a receiver, as the NYC Department of Correction (“DOC”) has shown it is unwilling and unable to protect the people in its custody and their constitutional rights, or to undertake the reforms needed to comply with core provisions of the consent decree and other court-ordered relief.
In its brief, amici offer insights from their experience as public defenders to highlight the impact of DOC’s excessive force and hyper-confrontational culture on people in custody, and the severe consequences of exposing people to normalized violence and disorder. The brief recounts stories of people who amici represent who have suffered enormous physical and psychological harm as a result of the chaos and dysfunction in New York City jails.
The five defender offices stated:
“For years, we have seen New York City’s jails plunge deeper and deeper into an abyss of chaos and cruelty, yet what we have witnessed in the past two years has been alarming beyond measure. DOC’s increasingly pervasive culture of hostility and aggression has inflicted outrageous violence, suffering, and neglect on the people we represent. The severity and urgency of the crisis in NYC jails requires the appointment of a receiver. Given the experiences of the
people we represent, no lesser remedy is appropriate.”
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Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month | May 2023
May is Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month, and we celebrate the rich and diverse contributions of people of Asian and Pacific Islander heritage. May was chosen as AAPI Month because of two key dates:
- May 7, 1843 commemorates the arrival of the first Japanese immigrants to the US.
- May 10, 1869, or Golden Spike Day, recognizes the completion of the first transcontinental railroad, which had significant contributions from Chinese workers.
Unfortunately, hate crimes against the AAPI community have dramatically increased across the nation and in NYC. For example, there were 131 reported hate crimes in NYC in 2021, compared with 28 in 2020. Unfortunately, this oppression is not new. The US has a painful history of discrimination against the AAPI community. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, for the first time, restricted entry of an ethnic group on the premise that it endangered the good order. During World War II, Japanese Americans on the West Coast were incarcerated at the order of the US Government because they were deemed a public danger.
The theme for AAPI Heritage Month in 2023 is Advancing Leaders Through Opportunity. We champion the successes of leaders in our AAPPI community. Here are a couple of organizations leading the cause for equal civil rights:
- The Asian American Foundation is a leading organization raising the influence and well-being of the pan-Asian American community. They work in the mental health, immigration integration, economic empowerment, and civic engagement spaces.
- NAAAP-New York (National Association of Asian American Professionals) is a Pan-Asian American professional organization that promotes the career advancement and leadership development of Asian American professionals.
Learn More Through Literature!
Inclusion: How Hawai‘i Protected Japanese Americans from Mass Internment, Transformed Itself, and Changed America by Tom Coffman
Here to Stay: Uncovering South Asian American History by Geetika Rudra
Citizens, Immigrants, and the Stateless: A Japanese American Diaspora in the Pacific by Michael R. Jin
The Loneliest Americans by Jay Caspian Kang
Pedagogies of Woundedness: Illness, Memoir, and the Ends of the Model Minority by James Kyung-Jin Lee
Permission to Come Home: Reclaiming Mental Health as Asian Americans by Jenny Wang
We Were Dreamers: An Immigrant Superhero Origin Story by Simu Liu
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
May is Mental Health Awareness Month
May is Mental Health Awareness Month. Despite cultural progress, mental health issues and care are still stigmatized in our society. Recent events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, political turmoil, environmental worries, and societal concerns of civil rights being stripped away only compound struggles with mental health.
Mental health care access for our clients is an acute problem. The Rikers Island, Department of Corrections complex is the largest psychiatric provider in NYC and one of the largest in the country. Approximately 50% of the Rikers’ population has a mental health diagnosis, and about 16% have a serious mental health diagnosis. Yet, mental health access is extremely poor at the Rikers Island complex. The following article details the deaths at Rikers Island through 2022, many of which are suicides. As a disclaimer, the article is very sad and troubling: https://www.nytimes.com/article/rikers-deaths-jail.html
Prioritizing access to mental health care should be a paramount concern for us, as QD colleagues and advocates for NYC’s most vulnerable populations. We struggle with criminal, family, housing, and immigration courts, and white supremacy and classism are baked into these systems which destroy lives, families, and communities. As public defender professionals, we consequently cope with secondary or vicarious trauma. This can manifest in many ways, including loss of sleep, headaches, stomachaches, chest pain, poor eating habits, or struggling to keep healthy relationships.
Learn More Through Literature!
Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others Paperback by Laura van Dernoot Lipsky and Connie Burk
Sometimes Amazing Things Happen: Heartbreak and Hope on the Bellevue Hospital Psychiatric Prison Ward by Elizabeth Ford MD, Bernadette Dunne, et al.
Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present by Nick Trenton
The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel van der Kolk
Letting Go: The Pathway To Surrender by David R. Hawkins
Transgender Day of Visibility - March 31st 2023
International Transgender Day of Visibility aims to celebrate the transgender community, while also drawing attention to discrimination and attacks faced by transgender and non-binary people. This issue couldn’t be more relevant today as state legislatures around the country are passing anti-trans bills.
We would like to highlight this courageous story from the Nebraska legislature. Machaela Cavanaugh, a Nebraska state senator, has engaged in a filibuster since February to prevent an anti-trans bill from becoming law. This bill would criminalize certain medicine and health care procedures for trans people under the age of 19. This filibuster has snarled virtually all action in the Nebraska state legislature.
We would also like to highlight this video on NBC News that includes an interview with actress and GLAAD (the world’s largest LGBTQ media advocacy group) Board Member, Peppermint, and Executive Director of the National Black Trans Advocacy Coalition, Carter Brown. They discuss how to be a respectful ally to the transgender community amid this waive of harmful legislation.