New York

Activists suspect the investigation was tainted by the close relationship between the police and prosecutors.

Federal defenders say the shutdown is hurting poor people stuck in jail.

She is suing the Division of Human Rights for saying it’s not authorized to investigate her complaint.

The miniseries depicting a New York prison escape fails to show what happened to the men left behind.

Prosecutors denounce bail reform efforts when people miss court dates, but ‘failure to appear’ rates obscure the fact that many who miss court aren’t on the run.

Prisoners in the state’s Regional Medical Units allege that they are being denied access to essential programs and services like law libraries.

Reports detail suicides and care for one woman that was ‘so grossly incompetent and inadequate as to shock the conscience.’

Advocates say victims are being pressured to sign ‘withdrawal’ forms to quickly close investigations and protect the department from legal liability.

Under Raise the Age, ‘there are kids similarly situated who are being treated totally differently.’

Decision-making by prosecutors in such cases, says one attorney, ‘compounds, entrenches, and ultimately authorizes the initial act of violence by prosecuting the victim.’

As Thursday’s election approaches, confusion reigns.

State Senate candidate Julia Salazar explains how sex workers’ rights is a key part of reforming criminal justice in New York.

Jacqueline Smalls was sentenced to 15 years in prison for killing a boyfriend whose ‘hands were his weapons.’ She now joins the ranks of criminalized survivors seeking clemency from Governor Cuomo.

From policing to parole, this election could be pivotal for reform.

Grassroots group VOCAL-NY is teaching people with substance use disorder how to avoid getting ensnared in the criminal justice system.

With journalist Bryce Covert.

A teenage girl spent weeks in jail, and her mother is still locked up on a $150,000 bond.

New York’s Democratic governor has granted only a trickle of commutations, fewer than many of his Democratic and Republican predecessors.

Walliris Velez thought the worst was behind her after she was slashed in a subway car, but then came an arrest and an attempted murder charge by the Bronx DA.

At the beginning of the year, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo laid out a plan that would eliminate cash bail for those charged with misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies. Last week, however, his plan stalled out during budget negotiations with state legislative leaders. For bail reform advocates, including public defenders and advocates for incarcerated people, the plan’s failure serves as […]

Brian Solano spent over two years on Rikers Island before a potentially exonerating NYPD video interview was disclosed to his defense attorney. But that video is now being excluded from his June trial.

On March 14, Herman Bell learned that after 45 years behind bars, he would soon be released from prison. The 70-year-old former Black Panther was convicted in the 1971 shooting deaths of two New York police officers. Since 2004, he appeared before the state’s parole board seven times; each time, he was denied parole because of the nature of […]

I love New York. It’s my favorite city in the world. I live and work here by choice. We get a lot of things right. Every day I walk down the street or hop on the subway, I am reminded that I am a citizen of a very big, incredibly diverse world. But our progressive […]

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently unveiled a legislative proposal packaged as part of a budget amendment to expand already onerous residency and presence restrictions for some sex offenders in New York. The proposal expands blanket presence and residency restrictions for sex offenders who are on parole or post-release supervision by vastly increasing the number of places they cannot be […]

By the time Steven Odiase learned of the evidence that would set him free, he’d already spent six years in prison for murder.

As the conversation about criminal justice reform increasingly focuses on the nation’s broken bail system, prosecutors across the country have announced new policies that purportedly aim to keep low-income people from being denied their freedom simply because they can’t afford to pay bail. In New York City, Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez and Manhattan District Attorney […]

Local activists are set to gather at New York’s City Hall today, urging Mayor Bill de Blasio to end his silence on the idea of the city opening a supervised injection facility, a medical setting for safely injecting drugs. Organized by VOCAL-NY, a nonprofit grassroots organization, the coalition of activists and drug users are calling out […]

Her former partner assaulted her in her home. When the police arrived, she was arrested and he walked free.

Each day in his small cell in a Manhattan federal prison, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera battles severe headaches and vomiting, his lawyer says. He spends several hours with members of his defense team, reviewing 300,000 pages of discovery to prepare for his upcoming trial on charges including “leading a continuing criminal enterprise,” drug distribution, use of firearms, and […]

For decades, the New York Police Department has subjected people it arrests to a labyrinthine and bureaucratic process for retrieving their seized property. Often, poor New Yorkers — many without the legal assistance needed to navigate this process — give up on their property instead of trying to get it back. In a rare disclosure to the public, the […]

In New York City, chants of “I can’t breathe” have given way to neatly run press conferences featuring Mayor Bill de Blasio’s boasts about how the NYPD’s “neighborhood policing” program, described as a collaborative crime-fighting strategy, brings the police and community together. Eric Garner’s killer still on the job and hasn’t faced justice? A horrifying story of rape involving cops from […]

Since its initiation in 2013, the NYPD’s gang policing program has operated with little outside scrutiny. Based on evidence it has kept almost entirely hidden from public view, the police have targeted and surveilled entire social networks inside low-income communities, breaking down doors in pre-dawn military-style raids that have resulted in over 2,000 arrests in just the […]

In almost every criminal case in New York City, the police department makes an arrest, and it’s up to the borough’s District Attorney to decide whether to prosecute. However, since the beginning of 2016, the Manhattan DA has taken the extraordinary step of allowing the NYPD’s Legal Bureau to prosecute some cases in court. Why? […]

Crime in New York City is at historic lows. The overall number of people in the city’s jails recently dipped below 9,000 for the first time since 1982. Yet the number of people locked up for violating the terms of their parole is on the rise. That is the conclusion of Less is More in New York City, a new […]

Early on the morning of January 19, the New York Police Department and local and federal partners raided the Sheepshead/Nostrand Houses, a large public housing complex in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, arresting 13 alleged members of the “Towaz Boyz gang.” Unnamed law enforcement authorities described the scene to the Daily Newsas a “New Jack City-style sales operation” — a reference […]

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Kentucky Attorney General Andy Beshear filed lawsuits last week against several pharmaceutical companies, including Purdue Pharma and McKesson Corporation, that manufacture and distribute opioid pain relievers, alleging that they are getting rich to the tune of $13 billion annually from an overdose crisis that kills 120 people each day. “By suing […]

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday heard oral arguments in a challenge to New York’s controversial “gravity knife” statute, the latest chapter in a fight against a law that has drawn broad criticism from criminal justice reform groups, in part for its disproportionate impact on people of color. Two of the plaintiffs in the case, […]

Yang Song fell four stories onto a sidewalk in Flushing, Queens on the night of November 25th. An officer with the New York City Police Department accompanied her, unconscious, to New York Presbyterian Hospital where doctors placed her on a respirator. They worked for hours: the 35 units of blood they transfused did not take, given the severity of her injuries from the thirty foot fall.

A 38-year-old woman, Yang Song of Queens, New York, died at New York Presbyterian Hospital on Sunday, one day after falling three stories from an apartment window in nearby Flushing. Little has been reported about Song beyond the New York Police Department’s assertion that she was a sex worker, and fell while officers from the Queens […]

A new app seeks to liberate people from more than “liberal malaise.”