NYC should pay Rikers inmates $3M for failing to take them to medical appointments, public lawyers charge

New York City should be fined $3 million for failing to bring inmates held in city jails to their medical appointments from February to October, public defense lawyers told a Bronx judge this week.

Legal Aid and Brooklyn Defender Services want the city to pay $250 for 12,354 missed medical appointments which occurred because Department of Correction staff did not escort them to their doctor visits or there was no space in the jail clinics, according to a motion filed late Monday in Bronx Supreme Court.

“Despite having already been held in contempt by a court, DOC has denied thousands more people access to medical appointments, and the department must be held in contempt once again for its continued failure to abide by explicit legal obligations and various court orders,” the public defender organizations said in a statement.

DOC and the city Law Department did not have an immediate comment.

Rikers Island

The demand stems from a class action lawsuit, Agnew v. City of New York, which alleges that city jail officials systematically failed to bring many people to appointments for more than a year.

In August, Judge Elizabeth Taylor, who is presiding over the case, ordered the city to pay $200,000 in contempt fines for missed visits prior to February. The city is appealing the ruling.

Taylor initially ruled the city was failing to perform its responsibility to get people to appointments in December 2021 and ordered DOC to fix the problem. She then found the city in contempt in May for failing to do so.

Key to the decision was an admission by then Chief of Facility Operations Ada Pressley who acknowledged in an affidavit it was impossible for DOC to comply because of staff absenteeism.

The 12,354 skipped appointments between February and October does not include visits missed for a range of other reasons, including lock-downs. Legal Aid has previously alleged that in some cases, staff fudged the numbers to suggest prisoners refused to go to visits when they had not.

In November, the Board of Correction reported a link between missed medical visits and some of the deaths that took place in the jails in 2022. In the death of Dashawn Carter on May 7, for example, the board reported he missed 92 visits including 76 because staff didn’t escort him.

Elijah Muhammad, who died of a fentanyl overdose July 10, missed 118 visits from September 2020 until his death including 100 because he wasn’t produced, the board said.

“People in the jails continue to suffer countless harms from delay and outright denial of access to injury care, chronic care, and critical medications, contributing to the highest death rate in DOC facilities in over 25 years,” the public defender groups said.

Nineteen people died in DOC custody in 2022, the most since 2013, when there were 23, but the jail population is about half the size it was then.

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