New York state’s highest court heard arguments Wednesday in a case where NYPD officers shackled an incarcerated, mentally ill man to a hospital bed for 26 days against a physician’s orders. Now, judges are weighing whether that man should be able to challenge those restraints — not the custody itself —with a habeas corpus petition, a legal action designed to get people out of illegal custody.
The judge’s decision in this man’s case could expand what the writ – which has recently exploded in use as attorneys rush to challenge illegal ICE detentions – can be used for and help clarify the correct legal pathway to challenge cops physically restraining incarcerated people against physicians’ orders, a process attorneys say is currently murky.
The Court of Appeals judges didn’t make it apparent which way they were inclined to rule after hearing arguments this week from both sides. Judges questioned whether other legal remedies, such as a lawsuit, would be more appropriate in these situations, while expressing the view that challenging this type of extreme physical restraint, where a person can’t even stand to use the bathroom, may be exactly what habeas petitions were designed for.
“That’s the point of a habeas: that there are particular types of confinement and restraint that must be dealt with immediately, that society says we cannot allow,” Judge Jenny Rivera said in response to arguments from the city’s attorney that allowing habeas petitions to be used in cases like this would be improper and result in proceedings that moved too fast for the city to properly argue.
“They might not have succeeded on the merits of the habeas, but we’re just talking about the ability to move the case along,” Rivera said. “This is not like any other type of confinement.”
Ruling could set new precedent in New York on habeas petition
What exactly a habeas petition can be used for has long been a question of debate. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that it should be used liberally, but New York’s courts have taken a narrower view, New York Law School professor Heather Cucolo said, pushing people to use other proceedings in situations like this. And it’s clear that courts generally have not found that habeas is a valid legal strategy to challenge conditions of confinement, such as the type of food someone is served.
“I think the argument has been made, certainly, that physical restraints are violative of constitutional rights and may have the equivalent impact of keeping someone more restrained than they would be otherwise,” said Cucolo, who specializes in criminal law. “But, it’s the [habeas petition’s] focus on that release from custody that seems to be the factual piece that gets in the way here in New York.”
Laureena Novotnak, the attorney representing the incarcerated man, argued this case wasn’t about conditions of confinement, but confinement itself via restraint. It wouldn’t be ushering in the radical expansion of what a habeas can be used for, as the city’s attorney suggested, but simply clarifying that this type of extreme physical confinement can be challenged by a habeas.
City attorney Jonathan Schoepp-Wong argued that a habeas was the wrong measure and unnecessary: if the physical restraints were indeed illegal, using a lawsuit to challenge them would be just as expeditious as a habeas, as an attorney could file the suit alongside a request for an immediate temporary order to remove the restraints.
This, Schoepp-Wong said, would balance the need to “address the immediate issue” of alleged illegal physical restraint and allow the city to put together a full case. It would also allow the attorney representing restrained incarcerated people to more fully challenge the NYPD’s policy of keeping people shackled to beds against physicians’ orders, which, attorneys said, violated the state’s mental hygiene law.
The fact that this case would have an impact beyond the man at its center underlaid Wednesday’s hearing. When Judges Caitlain Halligan and Michael Garcia asked Novotnak why, since the man has now been released from his restraints, it wouldn’t make sense at this point to convert his emergency habeas petition to a normal lawsuit, Novotnak said doing so would leave all vulnerable, illegally restrained patients in psychiatric units no option of using a habeas to seek release.
“It’s the downstream effects of saying that habeas is not available when a person is shackled to a bed for weeks on end,” Novotnak said. “He’s out now, but other patients are not.”
Cucolo she was interested in how heavily the judges would weigh the gravity of attempting to solve the problem of long-standing and persistent overuse of restraint in correctional and hospital settings against the question of whether a habeas is the correct legal procedure in a case like this.
“I think that the case has the potential to be defeated on very basic, simple procedural failures, but if for some reason there is a goal [of the judges] of looking at and addressing these issues on a wider scale, that could open up the door to very interesting outcomes,” Cucolo continued. “The concern, of course, would be, how many sort of procedural failures is the court willing to bypass in order to get an outcome that addresses this broader, more concerning substantive issue itself.”
Other legal remedies seen as slower
Novotnak and Legal Aid Society attorney Arielle Reid, who filed a brief in support of Novotnak’s argument, both said a temporary order within a lawsuit would still be slower than a habeas. Novotnak also argued the lawsuit the city proposed, called an Article 78, wouldn’t have even worked here, as restraining the man was simply the choice of the police officer on duty at the time, not a “final agency determination,” a requirement of Article 78 proceedings.
Not only would that mean their case would be doomed from the start, Novotnak said, but it would also probably cause the temporary order request to fail, as attorneys need to show that the case as a whole will likely be successful in order to obtain an order like that.
Reid said there was historical precedent for bringing a habeas petition when someone was “restrained in their liberty,” and she thought that there were “many ways” to restrain someone in that way.
“I think certainly, if somebody is physically restrained to a hospital bed, such that they can’t move their hips, they can’t stand up, they can’t go to the bathroom, you can’t get more physically restrained in that,” Reid said. “If that’s not what statute means by restrained in their liberty, then it’s hard to think of a circumstance that gets more restraining than that.”
Beyond all of that, though, Reid said she thought the case’s importance lay in the fact it was shining a light on police shackling pre-trial detainees to beds against doctors’ orders – something she said happens nearly every day – and in forcing the state’s high court to lay out the correct path for attorneys to challenge that shackling.
While she’d prefer that path be a habeas petition, as they’re the quickest and easiest option to challenge illegal restraint, she’ll be glad for a clear answer, regardless of what it is.
“Obviously, the legal question of whether a habeas is the appropriate mechanisms to challenge this is important, but I think equally, if not more important, is the fact that this is happening every day to so many people across the city, and there doesn’t really seem to be any impetus for those who have the power to change it to actually change it,” Reid said. “It’s a ridiculous thing that’s happening, it’s barbaric, and if anything, I hope this case sheds light on the underlying practice.”