JAILS PHONE CRISIS
Leaked private chats could clobber cases
A clerical error by a city contractor breached the attorney-client privilege for scores of city inmates, with more than 1,500 protected jailhouse phone calls between defendants and their legal advisers wrongly recorded, the Daily News has learned.
The shocking mistake, affecting inmates facing charges in Brooklyn and the Bronx, could compromise the court cases of nearly 400 defendants if their confidential conversations landed in the hands of prosecutors.
The system, run by the city-contracted prison communications firm Securus Technologies Inc., mistakenly recorded 118 calls with 29 inmates facing charges in the Bronx and another 1,450 chats involving 353 inmates’ cases in Brooklyn, according to several jail and city sources familiar with the findings of two internal audits conducted by the company this year. The erroneous recordings occurred in all city jails, not just on Rikers Island.
According to a source, human error on the part of Securus led to the legal misstep. The Correction Department provides the company with a list of protected phone numbers to ensure inmates’ conversations with lawyers, social workers and other legal parties are specifically not recorded.
The first audit, completed by late February, revealed that 18 phone numbers for the protected parties did not land on the Correction Department’s do-not-record list, the sources said.
The second audit found that 102 other phone numbers from Brooklyn defense teams also did not wind up on a do-not-record list as they should have, the sources said.
Criminal defendants have a constitutional right to lawyers and legal counsel — and New York law says their communications with lawyers and others helping their cases is strictly confidential.
The Correction Department first heard about the system screwup in December when several Bronx defenders flagged the issue, sources said. The department requested an audit from Securus detailing the extent of the compromised Bronx calls.
City Council Speaker Corey Johnson and Councilman Keith Powers, who is head of the Criminal Justice Committee, later heard rumors about massive blunder and wrote a letter to the Correction Department on Feb. 23 asking for an explanation, several sources told The News.
Ten days later, the Correction Department informed the Council members about the findings of the Securus audit on calls in the Bronx.
The agency then requested another audit from the firm, this one targeting calls made between Brooklyn counsel and defendants.
Powers called the massive gaffe “a blatant violation of rights.”
“In the last few weeks, we have seen a deeply troubling pattern of mismanagement from the Department of Correction,” Powers said in a statement to The News, referring to the accidental release of two inmates, one charged with murder and the other charged with attempted murder, and the recent deaths of two other inmates. “These incidents are unacceptable, and they highlight systemic problems,” he said.
“On Monday, the Department of Correction will appear before the City Council. We expect and demand full answers.”
“It’s beyond me how something like this could happen,” he said. “This is such a shocking breach of attorney client privilege that it raises serious concerns about the competency of the Department of Correction.”
Johnson echoed this sentiment. “It’s beyond me how something like this could happen,” he said.
Correction Department Deputy Commissioner of Public Information Peter Thorne also acknowledged the severity of the issue, and said the agency is working with Securus to resolve the matter.
“This breach in protocol was the result of a serious error on the part of our vendor, Securus,” Thorne said. ”Confidential communication between attorneys and clients is sacrosanct and we are providing any assistance we can in order to determine the extent of their error and remedy it as soon as possible.”
A Securus spokesman, in a statement to The News, acknowledged the errors and said measures were already in place to prevent the mix-up from happening again.
“We recently became aware of a phone number processing issue that resulted in the inadvertent recording of certain phone numbers designated as private. Upon learning of the processing issue, we took immediate steps to ensure that they were designated as private, blocking any further recordings of the designated phone numbers,” said the statement.