LAW CLASS / ESSAY ASSIGNMENT / MR



LAW CLASS / ESSAY ASSIGNMENT / MR. LIPMAN

Below you will find an edited version of a series of articles that appeared in the New York Times regarding the Bronx Criminal Court and its reputation for lengthy delays that result in unfair results from criminal arrests. There is a famous saying that “Justice delayed is Justice denied”. Using the article below, as well any research that may be necessary, write a 5 paragraph essay (it must be typed) that explains that famous quotation. {The full article, and pictures of all the people described in the article, can be found on the New York Times website which is

(NY Times April 14, 15, 16, 2013) {abbreviated}

The Bronx courts are failing.

With criminal cases languishing for years, a plague of delays in the Bronx criminal courts is undermining one of the central ideals of the justice system, the promise of a speedy trial.

At a time of slashed judicial budgets across the country, the Bronx offers a stark picture of what happens when an overwhelmed justice system can no longer keep pace: Old cases pile up, prosecutions fail at alarming rates, lives stall while waiting for court hearings and trust in the system and its ability to protect the public evaporates.

In the Bronx in recent years, there were more people in jail waiting years for their trials than in the rest of the city combined, court data show. The borough was responsible for more than half of the cases in New York City’s criminal courts that were over two years old, and for two-thirds of the defendants waiting for their trials in jail for more than five years.

In January, 73 percent of all Bronx felony cases exceeded the courts’ own time targets, far more than any other borough. And over the last two decades, the Bronx prosecutors’ jury conviction rate has plummeted. Less than half of jury trials now end in guilty verdicts, far fewer than elsewhere in the city, raising questions about whether rapists, robbers and killers are going free because the borough’s justice system is broken.

Just up the street from Yankee Stadium, that rare Bronx institution that gets the rest of the city’s attention, the gleaming glass courthouse has quietly become a place where dysfunction is expected. Failures by nearly every component of the criminal justice system have contributed to what is known inside the building as a “culture of delay.”

That includes a district attorney whose policies have contributed to a decline that extends over his long tenure, defense lawyers who exploit delays at every turn to help their clients beat charges, judges who are unable or unwilling to take command of their courtrooms and court administrators who overlooked the growing crisis while refusing requests for more resources. All of this happens in the poorest borough in the city, a place lacking the political clout to stir outrage and force reform.

Months of court visits in the Bronx beginning last June — which included observations of trials, examinations of case files and transcripts in scores of cases, analyses of law enforcement statistics and reports, and dozens of interviews with crime victims, witnesses, defendants, lawyers, court officials, judges and jurors — showed the broad range of problems afflicting the borough’s justice system.

For years trials have been postponed every week because there were not enough judges. But less compelling reasons are also sufficient, including prosecutors’ vacation plans and defense lawyers’ birthdays. Even excuses like a backache and a picnic were deemed sound enough to keep the courts waiting.

Prosecutors from the office of the Bronx district attorney, Robert T. Johnson, routinely tell defense lawyers handling two- and three-year-old cases that they are too new to be dealt with. Two years ago, a judge threw out all charges against a man accused of trying to murder a police officer simply because prosecutors had allowed too much time to pass.

At the same time, the court day is shrinking. It is at best a modest 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., with an hour for lunch. In practice it has been whittled further because even the most basic functions, like bringing prisoners to courtrooms, are undermined by cascading delays.

In the midst of The New York Times’s reporting, the top official in the state court system publicly acknowledged the “glaring problems” in the Bronx criminal courts, which he said went back “as long as I can remember.” In a January speech, the official, Jonathan Lippman, the state’s chief judge, called the court delays “intolerable,” “entirely unacceptable” and “singularly intractable.”

Concerns about an overburdened, underfinanced court system have nagged with increasing urgency across New York City. The number of felony cases citywide that exceed the courts’ own guidelines for excessive delay — 180 days in most felony cases — has more than doubled since 2000, even as the total number of felony cases has dropped by nearly a quarter. “The Bronx is a window into the problems in the criminal justice system across the city,” said Steven Banks, the citywide attorney in chief of the Legal Aid Society.

But even by comparison with other troubled courts across the city, the criminal courts of the Bronx stand out as crippled. A new analysis by The Times shows that the Bronx criminal courts slipped during the last decade into the bottom ranks of the most backlogged of the big-city courts in the country.

These problems worsened after two reorganizations left the Bronx criminal courts with fewer judges, a smaller budget and a bigger backlog of cases. The most recent attempt at resolving the felony backlog was announced by Judge Lippman in his January speech. The emergency measures included replacing the borough’s top criminal judge and bringing in a temporary “swat team” of judges to handle some of the oldest cases. Though court officials have called that effort a success, many Bronx judges and lawyers have been openly skeptical. They questioned whether the plan would deal with the causes of the problems because past efforts had only contributed to the backlog. State budget cuts two years ago trimmed 12 percent of the annual spending in the Bronx and in courts across the state.

The problems are visible even before entering the courthouse on 161st Street, where the line to get inside often stretches down the block and around the corner. Those waiting — whether victims, defendants, witnesses or supportive relatives — often turned to the same phrase: “Justice delayed is justice denied.” For them it was no platitude.

Sam Braverman, a veteran Bronx defense lawyer, recently had a 34-year-old client charged with murder freed after someone else confessed to that killing. His client had been in jail awaiting his trial for nearly three years. Those long waits are hardest to explain to the mothers of young men, particularly around the holidays, Mr. Braverman said in his cramped office near the courthouse. “I tell them: ‘I don’t want you thinking he’s going to be home for Christmas. Or the next Christmas, or the next Christmas after that.’ It tastes like vomit in my mouth when I have to say it.”

Inside the Bronx County Hall of Justice, everyone seems to be waiting. The translator is late. The prisoner is not yet up from the pens. The prosecutor is busy. There are not enough court officers. The jurors have not assembled. The judge is still in his chambers. Even the mail is late at the courthouse. One judge remembered finding four boxes of unopened mail addressed to the court. Some of it was months old.

Defense lawyers everywhere use delay to foster doubt. They capitalize on memories that grow murky and the holes that are blown in cases when prosecution witnesses go missing. In the Bronx, they have a lot to work with. They point out how different an accused man looks from long-ago descriptions. They demand lost paperwork. They wait for witnesses to vanish, to be shot to death, to change their minds. Or to forget. “It was two years ago; it’s a long time ago,” a police officer said in one Bronx assault trial. Verdict: Not guilty.

In another case, the star witness in a murder trial said that after nearly four years, too much time had passed to be sure who pulled the trigger. “People change,” he said. Verdict: Not guilty.

In the hands of the right defense lawyer, a choirboy witness one year can be portrayed as a liar or worse if that witness happened to be arrested in the meantime. This is a favored Bronx strategy for the hard cases: “We wait for their witnesses to get locked up,” said Edward R. Dudley Jr., who has been a Bronx defense lawyer for nearly 40 years. As the delays worsened, the office of Mr. Johnson, the Bronx district attorney, began to lose at a breathtaking rate.

John P. Collins, a former Bronx criminal courts administrative judge, said Bronx judges felt there had been a crisis for many years. “I would ask for more resources and I would be told they weren’t needed,” he said. After years of complaints, he said, state court administrators told him to step down in 2009.

With a single judgeship carrying an annual price tag of nearly $1 million because of staff and security costs, state court officials have not asked the Legislature for new criminal judges for years. Instead, they shift judges around and make do.

If delay is painful for victims and witnesses, it is searing for defendants. Some of them are innocent. But many of them are unsympathetic figures — sometimes brutally violent, sometimes pathological. Still, they say they are entitled to more than the Bronx courts provide.

Last winter, a Rikers Island prisoner named Jeffrey Wilson wrote a letter to a Bronx judge. It was stuffed in a court file. By then, his case was one of the 10 oldest in the borough. It had been four years since he was arrested, accused of assaulting a man with a club. The file documented numerous delays that seemed to overlook his right to a speedy trial, including one day when the lawyer appointed to represent him missed court, saying he had a backache.

Another Bronx jury took two hours to acquit a 22-year-old named Michael Ikoli of murder. He had waited in jail for five years. His freedom was brief: He was fatally shot on the Bronx streets two years later.

In the Bronx courthouse, time seems to move at a different pace than it once did. What was once an outrageous delay is now just the way the system works. The state’s “speedy trial” law sets a target of 180 days — 6 months — after an arraignment, for most felony trials to begin. There is no target for homicides. But in practice, there are many ways to stretch that limit: court scheduling delays do not count toward that time limit and prosecutors can pause the clock by asking for a few days postponement when the court cannot reschedule a case for months. In the Bronx, the median length of cases was 517 days from arrest to disposition, more than twice the time it took in Manhattan, recent data showed.

There was a time, not too long ago, when the speedy-trial principle carried more meaning. Back in 1975, the state’s highest court reviewed a Bronx murder case and declared, unequivocally, that 18 months was far too long to wait for a trial. “Society too,” the Court of Appeals said, “has an interest in seeing that those accused of crimes are swiftly brought to justice.” Four years later, the Court of Appeals overturned another Bronx homicide conviction after a judge called 18 1/2 months in jail before trial “shocking by any standard.”

Now, almost four decades after the courts drew that line in the sand, it has been all but washed away. Three and a half years, one judge wrote in September, was “not necessarily unusual” in the Bronx. In another case that was nearly four years old, a Bronx judge went through the familiar reasons for delay and reached a resigned conclusion. “Unfortunately,” the judge wrote, “this is the reality of felony indictments in the current court system.”

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Here, if a little late, was Douglas G. Rankin for the defense, the very personification of a justice system tied up in knots. His tardiness had already earned him a reputation around the city that had made its way to the Bronx. Over several months, he offered Bronx judges various explanations for keeping them waiting: overly demanding judges elsewhere, a lost E-ZPass, a mislaid phone number and, on more than one occasion, traffic on the Bruckner Expressway. Not all judges have been persuaded.

In Manhattan in 2011, one took the rare step of removing Mr. Rankin as the defense lawyer in a case, saying his delays over two and a half years had “wreaked much more havoc than might be apparent.” In Brooklyn, he was so renowned for keeping the courts waiting that a special judge assigned to clear a stack of his old cases declared it was Mr. Rankin’s “practice to delay trials.” But in the Bronx courthouse, his reputation as a world-class delayer provoked no particular outrage. Court officials said that one of his cases was at the very top of the list of the oldest of more than 5,000 felony cases clogging the most clogged of New York City courts.

One of the little secrets of the courts is that, aside from scolding and threatening, New York’s judges have limited control over the court system they appear to run. The courthouse players they control the least are the busy, privately hired defense lawyers like Mr. Rankin, who race from court to court across the city, living on their cellphones and billing for their time. The judges rarely take steps like issuing fines or holding a lawyer in contempt, which are viewed as extreme and difficult to impose. They are even more reluctant to pull a privately retained lawyer off a case.

Mr. Rankin insisted in the interviews that he did not understand why he seemed to affect some judges that way. Perhaps, he said, it was because some people were upset by his victories for people accused of crimes, like a young man cleared of a baseball bat assault, and a woman acquitted on charges of shooting a taxi driver in the eye.

He did not mention another reason for the whispers about him. In 2008, his fiancée — an assistant district attorney in Brooklyn, Sandra Fernandez — admitted she had violated the law by getting confidential criminal history reports on people who were possible witnesses against Mr. Rankin’s clients. Such information can be gold to a defense lawyer. Ms. Fernandez, who is now married to Mr. Rankin, lost her job and law license. She also pleaded guilty to eight counts of official misconduct. Mr. Rankin was not charged, and the experience did not rein in an outsize courthouse personality who wrestles the justice system to his will — and schedule.

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They brought him into the Bronx courtroom late on that first day of the trial, his prisoner’s chains jingling. But Chad Hooks, 23 years old and charged with murder, was used to waiting. He had been waiting for three years, seven months and three days at Rikers Island for a trial that never seemed to come. “I hear the same excuse every time: ‘Not ready,’ or, ‘We’re doing something that’s more important,’ ” he had said at the jail. “I feel like I’ll die here.”

Melissa Lawyer had waited, too. Mr. Hooks was charged with shooting to death her 21-year-old son, Jevon, in a grimy hallway on Southern Boulevard near Hunts Point Avenue in the Bronx. For nearly four years, her hopes for justice had been choked by gnawing worry. She had had nightmares in which Mr. Hooks was chasing her. She said it meant he would get away with murder.

This little-noticed case at the Bronx County Hall of Justice became a parable of the way delays infect trials with murkiness, mocking the very idea that courts do their best, when it matters most, to find out what really happened. As the years passed, memories turned hazy. Detectives retired. One witness recanted. Two were lost and then found again. By the time the prosecutors said they were ready for trial on a September day in 2012, a fourth witness — the star witness — had been shot to death in the Bronx. What were left were contradicting claims and missing answers.

The defense said Mr. Hooks was an innocent man who had been tormented to the point of ruin by his wait for justice. The prosecution suggested he was a wily killer using the passage of time to silence the witnesses against him.

In other parts of the country, this case might be old enough to raise questions about whether the Constitution’s promise of a speedy trial had any meaning at all. But this was far from the oldest case in the Bronx, where court delays have compounded for decades, mounting a crisis severe enough to challenge the basic notion of justice. But now, finally, in that courtroom on 161st Street, the assistant district attorney, April Cohen, rose. There was an expectant rustle in the mostly empty courtroom. The prosecutor’s first words, however, were not about the killing of Mr. Lawyer. They were a request for days off. She had three scheduled. And then she would need a day when her nephew was born and then a day to celebrate the birth. The judge said he was confused about why a trial had to be put off because someone else was having a baby. “Maybe I’m missing something?” he asked, though eventually the prosecutor ended up getting the time off. That first day of the trial was the 1,311th day of waiting for Mr. Hooks’s day in court.

The killing happened outside a raucous teenage party in a neglected apartment building that serves as a shelter for homeless families. The guest of honor, a 19-year-old nicknamed Rockstar, took a bullet in the leg. He survived to become a reluctant witness. Most of the partygoers slipped away into the night.

It took three weeks for the police to settle on their suspect. The police showed a neighborhood drug dealer pictures from a security camera of the teenagers streaming out of the building on Southern Boulevard. At first the drug dealer, who had been shot in the shin five days before Mr. Lawyer was killed, told detectives he had been high and had not seen who shot him. But he later identified Mr. Hooks. He said the man had killed Mr. Lawyer too.

Mr. Hooks was in the building the night of the party, but he said he had been visiting a friend on a different floor. A high-school dropout who had just turned 20, Mr. Hooks was already a father and his girlfriend had a second baby on the way. He had grown up in Englewood, N.J., where his family had moved to get away from the violence in Harlem. At times, he seems like a soft suburban teenager; at times, he displays a hard edge of the city. He has an infectious smile and a dandyish preference for Izod shirts and Prada shoes. He also has a history of trouble with the law.

The case against him was a tangle from the start. Some of the early descriptions of the killer were of someone 5 foot 8 and heavy; Mr. Hooks is 6 foot 3 and slender. There were no fingerprints. No gun was found. There was no evidence that Mr. Hooks knew the victim, making the question of motive vague. The passage of time made nothing clearer. Nearly three years after identifying Mr. Hooks as the killer, the drug dealer swore to a new statement. He said that detectives had written his first statement implicating Mr. Hooks and that it was false. “The man is innocent and he should not be in custody,” the new statement said.

As the months in jail became years, Mr. Hooks sometimes seemed desperate. In 2010, after long stretches in a tiny room at Rikers where he spent 23 hours a day, he told a doctor he had tried to hang himself. “He has spent the last 11 months in punitive isolation following frequent fighting with both inmates and staff,” his hospital records said.

“There has been ‘no progress in his case in two years,’ ” the records continued, quoting him: “ ‘I want to hang up.’ ” The violence at Rikers continued. When Mr. Hooks refused to be searched one day, the correction officers subdued him with chemicals. In a confrontation in his cell the next month, he kicked, punched and head-butted officers, the officers said in a report. After one confrontation, he was so injured he could not sit down. After another, he needed stitches on his face. Though Mr. Hooks said the guards had beat him for no reason, similar complaints came from the court officers in charge of him when he had court dates. They said he had spouted racial epithets and spit. For court appearances, they started putting him in a Hannibal Lecter-like contraption called a spit mask to protect the officers.

Three years and nine months after those shots in the hallway, a jury finally heard about the police call that night: “Male shot.” They heard that a bullet went through Mr. Lawyer’s heart. But other than the fact of the death in the hallway, so much was unknown.

The testimony offered constant reminders of how much time had passed.

The lead detective, since retired, could not remember if he had been to the scene of the shooting that night. He could not remember the details of a lineup in the case. He could not remember whether a notation in his patrol book back in 2009 — “heavy Spanish kid” — might have meant an overweight Hispanic youth had been identified as the killer. “His memory is not so solid,” Judge Ethan Greenberg said from the bench.

A homeless woman, lost and then found by the defense, took the stand to say she saw a short heavyset youth — someone who did not look like Mr. Hooks — leaving the building with a gun after the shooting. She identified a pale-skinned young man in a security photograph. But she fell apart during cross-examination when she was asked if she had once said the gunman was black. “It’s been so many years,” she said through tears.

But the make-or-break moment for the prosecutor was when Rockstar, whose real name is Akeem Giddins, took the stand. He remembered the night of the party and the scores of teenagers there, many with their own street nicknames: Joe Smooth, Scrumpys, Goofy Kid. He remembered the shot, the sting in his leg, the body in the hall. He remembered telling the police at first that he had not seen the gunman, and later changing his account and identifying Mr. Hooks in a lineup. Then came the standard theatrical courtroom moment when the prosecutor asks the witness whether the perpetrator is there in court and the witness points to the defendant. But in the trial of Mr. Hooks for a killing three years and nine months earlier, that moment turned the case upside down. Ms. Cohen asked if Mr. Giddins could identify the gunman in the courtroom. “No, ma’am,” Mr. Giddins said. “People change.” “It’s a couple of years ago,” he said.

After they acquitted Mr. Hooks on all counts, on Oct. 25, 2012, the jurors lingered in the big lobby of the courthouse. Melissa Lawyer left the courthouse alone. The delays had crippled the case and set her son’s killer free, she said. “I put all my trust in the system and they failed me,” she said. But Mr. Hooks did not walk free that afternoon after the Bronx courts officially declared him an innocent man. It turned out there were charges against him in New Jersey, where he was accused of robbing a student at gunpoint in a high school in 2007. He was not guilty of murder, but he was back in chains and headed back to jail. Mr. Hooks was finally released in November pending a trial in New Jersey. A month later, he was arrested in upstate New York on charges of using a forged prescription at a drugstore. When they searched the van in which he was traveling, the police said, they found a loaded handgun. He is in jail awaiting trial.

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