Judge hurls F-bomb at lawyer for city jails as class-action suit drags
There’s no mistaking Manhattan Federal Judge Colleen McMahon’s dislike of city Department of Correction stonewalling — ire she says has been building over her 24 years on the bench.
“There is no agency that ... has been a more troublesome litigant in terms of, and you will excuse my language, ‘F—- you, judge, I’ll do what I want’ in that period than DOC,” McMahon said in open court on Friday.
McMahon spoke during proceedings in a class action lawsuit over conditions and illegal detentions at Rikers Island (photo). She prefaced her profane remark by stating: “I just want to lay my cards on the table in a manner that impresses everyone with how seriously I take this.”
Her frustration was aimed at Correction Department general counsel Paul Schechtman and city Corporation Counsel Sylvia Hinds-Radix over the city’s failure to promptly provide information on the identities of staffers who may be involved in the lawsuit’s allegations.
In the suit, filed in August, detainee Roddrick Ingram and five other named plaintiffs allege they were held in terrible conditions in the jails well after they posted bail or were ordered released.
McMahon said the blame for the city’s stonewalling lay squarely with the Correction Department, not the city Law Department. “I have seen some very fine employees in Ms. Hinds-Radix’s office driven to distraction in their efforts to get information” from the Correction Department, the judge said.
After being rebuffed repeatedly for months in his request for the staff names, Ingram’s lawyer Richard Cardinale wrote McMahon Jan. 26 describing the Correction Department as an “unresponsive bureaucracy.”
“The DOC knows the names of the supervisors and officials in charge of these operations,” he wrote. “They should not be allowed to shift the blame.”
McMahon, who has previously criticized conditions in federal lockups, then ordered Hines-Radix and Shechtman to appear. She noted she had already granted the city two extensions.
“This is far from the first time that this court has encountered unconscionable and unreasonable lack of response due to the Department of Correction,” she wrote Jan. 30. “I am determined to put an end to it.”
On Thursday, Wynee Ngo, a city lawyer, filed a letter apologizing twice for the delay, saying the information requests were “regrettably overlooked.”
McMahon said she’d heard that one before. “This is, like, the 800th letter like this I’ve received,” she told Schechtman on Friday.
“The word has to go back to your people that I’m just not going to put up with this anymore, that they can’t keep the names of people who were involved in incidents secret,” the judge said.
Shechtman replied he would take responsibility if it happens again. “Judge, we have known each other for a long time,” he said. “Your order said, ‘Going forward, who should I hold in contempt?’ And the answer is me.”
Following Friday’s hearing, Law Department spokesman Nicholas Paolucci said: “The city takes its discovery obligations seriously and is working to respond accordingly.”
The city plans to file a motion against what it calls “overly broad” discovery requests in the case.
The Ingram case turns on two key rules regarding detention in the jails: no detainee can spend more than 24 hours waiting to be assigned a bed, and once they make bail or are otherwise ordered released, detainees have to be let go in a timely manner.
Ingram alleges he was arrested Oct. 18 2021 and then spent 35 hours in a overcrowded intake cell with a broken toilet overflowing with feces. He had to sleep on the disgusting cell floor.
After his father paid his bail, it took the Correction Department another 24 hours to release him, the lawsuit alleges.
Two other men, Gerson Castro and Edwin Ortiz, claim they were held for days in November 2021 in similarly filthy intake cells where they had to sleep on the floor, the lawsuit alleges. Even after a judge ordered them released, it took DOC five more days to actually let them out.