NYC to pay $103m to end flimsy summonses suits

UNITED STATES: New York City has agreed to pay up to US$75 million (NZ$103m) to settle a classaction lawsuit alleging police officers issued nearly 1 million legally baseless criminal summonses over several years because they were under pressure to meet quotas.

The settlement announced yesterday would allow people issued court summonses for offences such as trespassing, disorderly conduct and urinating in public to get US$150 per case, if the summons was tossed because it was deemed insufficient.

The suit was filed in a federal court in 2010 on behalf of people who were hit with 900,000 court summonses that were later dismissed for legal insufficiency.

It came amid a growing outcry over the New York Police Department’s encounters with minorities.

The lead plaintiff in the case, Sharif Stinson, said he was stopped twice outside his aunt’s Bronx building in 2010 when he was 19 and was given disorderly conduct summonses by officers who said he used obscene language.

But the officers didn’t specify what the language or behaviour was, and the tickets were dismissed.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs called it the largest false-arrest class-action lawsuit in city history.

The settlement is nearly double the US$41 million deal the city made with five men who were wrongly convicted in the vicious 1989 rape and beating of a Central Park jogger.

The 2010 lawsuit includes summonses filed from 2007 through at least 2015, and the number tossed for legal insufficiency is about onequarter of all the summonses filed during that time, according to data in the lawsuit. Insufficiency is not necessarily a lack of evidence; it may be that an officer wasn’t clear enough in explaining why someone was ticketed. Summonses may also be dismissed for other reasons; the class-action lawsuit doesn’t include those.

According to the settlement terms, those eligible for compensation would receive a maximum $150 per person per incident. -AP