- On Thursday, a Manhattan judge ruled that anyone arrested in Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan could be held for more than 24 hours without charge.
- New York Congresswoman
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted on Friday that this ruling was "unconstitutional" and a "suspension of habeus corpus," a 900-year old foundational legal doctrine that prohibits extended detention without charge. - Legal advocates claimed that this was retaliation for protests against police brutality, while lawyers representing police said this characterization is "disenginous."
On Thursday, a Manhattan judge ruled that anyone arrested in Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan could be held for more than 24 hours without being formally charged with a crime after the Legal Aid Society, a New York Legal advocacy group, sued the
New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez condemned the ruling Friday, denouncing it on Twitter as "unconstitutional" and a "suspension of habeus corpus."
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Civil liberties protect ourselves from governments using "crises" and "emergencies" as justification to dismantle our rights.<br><br>This is suspension of habeus corpus, it is unconstitutional, and it is deeply disturbing that both NYPD is seeking it and a judge rubber stamped it. <a href="https://t.co/t3K4EoNB6j">https://t.co/t3K4EoNB6j</a></p>— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) <a href="https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1268702650276732928?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 5, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Habeas corpus is a 900-year-old legal doctrine that prohibits unlawful detention without a criminal charge, and is one of the earliest bedrock principles of the English and American court systems. While the principle is protected at the Federal level by the Constitution, the 24-hour standard in New York was established by the Roundtree v. Brown case in 1991.
Habeas corpus was first lifted in America by President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War to detain people with Confederate or anti-war sympathies, and more recently was used to justify the indefinite detention of hundreds of people at Guantanamo Bay.
Protests have erupted across the country a Minneapolis police officer, later charged with second-degree murder, kneeled on George Floyd's neck until he died. After large protests embroiled New York for days, Mayor Bill de Blasio enacted a curfew, the first in the city since 1943.
New York City Criminal Court Judge James Burke said that he made the decision because there is "a civil unrest crisis within the overarching COVID-19 crisis."
Legal Aid lawyer Marlen Bodden told the New York Post that jail conditions prove challenging for social distancing, especially for people without masks or hand sanitizer. Coronavirus has the potential to spread rapidly in detention, as social distancing may be impossible in cramped cells.
"This flagrant violation of
"The accusation that officers are retaliating against New Yorkers who are protesting is disingenuous, exceptionally unfair, and perhaps deliberately ignoring the fact that the Police Department is dealing with a crisis within a crisis," Patricia Miller, chief of the Special Federal Litigation Division which defends the city police in civil suits, said in a statement to Insider.
Lucian Chalfen, a spokesperson for the Office of Court Administration, put blame on the police and prosecutors for the slow pace at which they were filing the necessary paperwork in a statement to the New York Times.
"We are working as fast and safely as we can," an NYPD spokesperson told Insider on Friday evening.
The Legal Aid Society filed an appeal to the decision on Friday.