From Inquest:
The morning of September 27, at the beginning of their shift in criminal court, public defenders across New York City did what they always do during their clients’ first appearance before a judge: They stated their own names for the record and whom they were there to represent. But on this day, these defenders added a twist: They spoke up in honor of each of the 12 people who, as of that day, had died in city jails in 2021, nearly all of them on the Rikers Island jail complex. Their names and the circumstances of each of their deaths, which are a direct consequence of the city’s own neglect for the people in its custody, were all read into the court’s record — with a demand that no one else be detained pretrial, lest they risk a similar fate.
This statement for the record was a product of organizing within Five Boro Defenders, a collective of lawyers serving indigent clients in New York City, which researched the publicly reported details surrounding each of the deaths. Five Boro Defenders member Maryanne Kaishian wrote the statement, which was shared with defenders across the city. After the reading of the statement, which was captured by reporters for The Intercept and The New Yorker, walkouts and rallies took place outside all five courthouses — in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island.
Inquest is publishing this prepared statement below in full — both to show how public defenders have responded to the ongoing crisis in New York City jails, and as an example of how lawyers, too, can organize and stage actions against the inhumanity of the system. In this case, they did so in the hopes of preventing entirely preventable death, illness, and trauma at the hands of the state. Continue reading >>>
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