Longreads profiles The Bronx Defenders. “The quality of the lawyering among public defenders in New York City is universally understood to be very high; that wasn’t Robin Steinberg’s concern. She saw inadequacy built into the very structure of public defense. In the nineties, she noticed that more of the clients she was defending were being…
Emily Galvin, an attorney in our Criminal Defense Practice, published the following piece in Slate about the need to rethink prison employment. Most people are at least intuitively aware of the connection between poverty and prison. As Bryan Stevenson, the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, has said, too often the opposite of poverty…
Runa Rajagopal, Director of Civil Action Practice at The Bronx Defenders, will join the following panel on Friday, May 6, 2016, as part of the Bridging the Divide Series at John Jay College in New York City. Panel: Nuisance Abatement And Broken Windows Eli B. Silverman, Professor Emeritus, author of NYPD Battles Crime: Innovative Strategies in Policing;…
Social workers and civil legal advocates from The Bronx Defenders will present the following two workshops at the 2016 National Organization of Forensic Social Work (NOFSW) Conference in New Orleans, LA, on June 17-19, 2016. Saturday, June 18 (3:15-4:45) Developing Written Advocacy Skills: Persuasion and Disruption This workshop will provide instruction on how to develop…
Robyn Mar, Deputy Director of the Criminal Defense Practice at The Bronx Defenders, will present at an event at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, entitled “Resetting Bail — The Price of Justice in New York City,” on Wednesday, May 11, 2016. The event is hosted by the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice and…
Christa Douaihy, supervising attorney in our Civil Action Practice, published the following piece in The Huffington Post about the NYPD’s use of obscure laws to facilitate the eviction of families from their homes without basic fairness or due process. The Movement for Black Lives has, among many things, created a renewed sense of urgency for policy makers to address our…
Last February, attorney Anisha Gupta represented a Latino man charged with two misdemeanors: trespassing and resisting arrest. At her client’s arraignment, the first appearance before a judge where a bail determination is made, Gupta thought her client would be quickly let out on his own recognizance — meaning a release without posting bail; the prosecution…
A 22-year-old black man stands with his hands clasped behind his back as the prosecution reads charges to the judge. Low-level assault, a class D felony. Recommended bail? $75,000. It’s 6:45 PM on a Saturday evening at Brooklyn Criminal Court, and the audience is comprised mostly of family members—some of whom will wait until one…
When Chidinma Ume, an assistant counsel in the New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, visited Queens recently, district attorney staff showed her around the courthouse, taking care to point out unused areas. “We gave her a tour of the courthouse, and how many locked doors that we have in courtrooms because we have…
Too often in New York City, the maxim “justice delayed is justice denied” is no mere abstraction, but a reality that wears down defendants, dispirits victims and cheats taxpayers. This is particularly true in the city’s criminal court, where lower-level cases—misdemeanors and petty offenses—are adjudicated and where the gaze of policymakers and the press rarely…
For the past several years, police departments across America have been using a nifty new piece of technology to trace the location of suspects. IMSI-catchers—commonly known as “StingRays” after the most popular brand name—are small boxes that gather all cell signals in a given area by mimicking a cell phone tower. And they’ve grown increasingly…
Adrienne broke the law: Caught speeding on her way home from work in Memphis, Tennessee, she pled guilty to charges of reckless driving and reckless endangerment. Two years later, Adrienne had completed probation and paid her court fees. But the charges still appeared on background checks, so she could find only temporary work. The barrier…
THE MORNING OF MAY 4, 2011, Jameelah El-Shabazz watched out the window of her Bronx apartment as a team of police officers fanned across the rooftop of Banana Kelly High School. The 43-year-old mother of five said she didn’t think much of the scene — drug raids were common in her neighborhood. As she did…
A new program on the Flathead Reservation is helping people who are released from tribal jail or the state prison adjust to life after incarceration. There are many “collateral consequences” people deal with upon their release — inability to find a place to live, struggling to get a job and issues getting drivers licenses reinstated,…
Sonia Sotomayor, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, says that she prefers to be called Sonia from the Bronx. Chances are nobody who meets her ever dreams of calling her anything so informal. When she came back to her native borough last week for an Evening of Conversation at the Bronx Defenders, a nonprofit…
On Monday, January 25th, The Bronx Defenders hosted U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor for an evening of conversation at its justice campus in the South Bronx. Local community members, staff members and supporters of The Bronx Defenders were present. The conversation between Robin Steinberg, Executive Director of The Bronx Defenders, and Justice Sotomayor…
In his recently-released policy agenda for 2016, Gov. Andrew Cuomo included a plan to reform the state’s bail system. While it has not been fully fleshed out yet, Cuomo’s proposal dictates that judges would use a scientific assessment tool to determine an individual’s “risk to public safety” while setting bail, a proposal similar to one…
The Center for Holistic Defense provides in-depth, hands-on support or technical assistance to individual offices and defender systems seeking concrete guidance in realizing the vision of holistic defense. Each year, The Center for Holistic Defense releases a Request for Proposals (RFP), soliciting applications from defender offices nationwide to receive six months of in-depth technical assistance….
The Bronx Defenders is thrilled to announce that Craig Levine has joined the organization as Managing Director of our Civil Action Practice and External Affairs. In this role, Craig will oversee a critical component of The Bronx Defenders’ groundbreaking holistic defense practice, which provides our clients with the civil legal services they need to address…
In the recent police shooting death of teenager in Chicago, a court ordered the public release of the dashboard camera video. But why are police in control of this type of footage? Sarah Lustbader, staff attorney at the Bronx Defenders, a public defender office, discusses the circumstances surrounding a court order for the release of…
A Chicago police officer shot and killed a teenager named Laquan McDonald in October of last year, but most of us learned about Mr. McDonald only last week, after a judge ordered the release of police video footage of his death. That is also when prosecutors finally brought first-degree murder charges against the officer. Clearly,…
The Bronx Defenders is thrilled to launch the Robert P. Patterson, Jr. Mentoring Program, which will provide adult mentors to at-risk youth in the South Bronx. Using The Bronx Defenders’ collaborative team-based model, the program will broaden the mentee’s positive social network beyond a single mentor to include a team of dedicated advocates. Each mentee will…
How an Unusual Team Helps Extricate Bronx Residents From NYC’s Criminal-Justice System The Bronx Defenders do more than go to court. It was 1999, and Wendy was in solitary confinement in an upstate New York prison, reeling from the effects of heroin withdrawal. In pain, she oscillated between two thoughts: “I wanted to believe that…
Last February, Harold Stanley was on his block one evening, in the Morrissania section of the Bronx. He decided to drive to McDonalds, and when he came back, sat in his parked car to eat. “Next thing I know somebody’s tapping on my window, telling me get out the car,” he said. “And I said…
An arcane 134-year-old process few New Yorkers have even heard of means the NYPD can take the possessions — cars, cash, computers — of anyone who gets stopped, even if it’s for jaywalking and even if that person never gets convicted or even charged. And because those so-called civil forfeiture proceedings are civil, New Yorkers…