One May afternoon in 2024, a 49-year-old homeless man with a long history of mental illness stood in the middle of a street in the Bronx, talking to himself, screaming at traffic and nearly getting hit by cars.<\/p>\n
The police were summoned, checked his record and found he had three outstanding warrants, including one for felony weapon possession. The man was arrested after resisting, court records show, and was taken to a locked psychiatric ward at Jacobi Medical Center, a city hospital in the Bronx, to await arraignment.<\/p>\n
There, the man, identified in the records only as Louis M. to protect his privacy, was handcuffed to the bed, shackled at the legs and guarded by a police officer.<\/p>\n
His arraignment was delayed, but the restraints stayed on. After three days, his psychiatrist asked police officers to remove them; they declined, repeatedly. He remained chained to his bed around the clock, except for one or two bathroom trips a day.<\/p>\n
His lawyers say it took 26 days after his arrest for his restraints to finally be removed. Several months later, all the criminal charges against him were dropped.<\/p>\n
The length of Louis M.\u2019s immobilization was unusual. But shackling mentally ill people awaiting criminal arraignment has long been standard police procedure in New York City.<\/p>\n
The Police Department\u2019s patrol guide<\/a> instructs officers: \u201cDo not remove handcuffs or leg restraints, unless requested by attending physician.\u201d Such requests are almost never granted, legal service lawyers and psychiatrists say.<\/p>\n The practice is being challenged in a suit argued in Albany on Wednesday<\/a> at the State Court of Appeals, New York\u2019s highest court. The suit argues that it is unnecessary for the police to shackle people in locked psychiatric wards because the wards are already set up to deal with potentially violent patients.<\/p>\n More than that, the suit says, the practice is psychologically and physically harmful, and violates patients\u2019 due process rights and state mental hygiene law, which places strict limits on shackling.<\/p>\n Keeping Louis M. chained to a bed for weeks \u201coffends the most basic notions of justice,\u201d says the suit, brought on his behalf by the Mental Hygiene Legal Service, a state agency that represents psychiatric patients.<\/p>\n While people who are arrested are supposed to be arraigned before a judge within 24 hours, the legal service says longer delays are routine. A recent analysis by the Legal Aid Society found that arrestees held in hospitals were disproportionately likely to face delayed arraignments, for a variety of reasons.<\/p>\n In court filings, the city maintains that hospital wards \u201care designed for different purposes than holding cells focused on preventing the flight of someone accused of a crime.\u201d It argues that keeping arrestees in restraints is a necessary safety precaution, and that limits on shackling do not apply to the police.<\/p>\n The suit raises fundamental questions of jurisdiction. An arrestee held involuntarily in a psychiatric ward is simultaneously in the custody of the police and the hospital. Each is subject to different rules and laws. What happens when the two dominions clash?<\/p>\n The suit predates the election of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who campaigned on a pledge to sharply reduce the police\u2019s role<\/a> in dealing with people suffering from severe mental illness. A spokesman for Mr. Mamdani, Sam Raskin, said on Tuesday that the mayor\u2019s administration could not comment on the specific circumstances of the case, but that it was \u201ccommitted to improving the city\u2019s approach to helping New Yorkers facing mental health challenges by advancing an all-of-government, holistic approach to the issue.\u201d<\/p>\n The policy laid out in the patrol guide applies equally to people accused of murder and those charged with burglary or simple drug possession. The legal service said it had one client who was shackled for a week after her arrest on charges of sending a threatening text message to her sister.<\/p>\n In a friend-of-the-court brief, two senior psychiatrists at Mount Sinai Medical Center with a combined 40 years\u2019 experience in emergency psychiatric units identified \u201cexactly one instance\u201d in which they remembered police officers agreeing to remove a patient\u2019s shackles.<\/p>\n The brief cites the case of a 60-year-old woman with a urinary tract infection who was shackled in 2020 and \u201cfrequently urinated on herself and constantly cried over the odor and embarrassment\u201d because officers were slow to take her to the bathroom.<\/p>\n According to the suit and psychiatric literature, extended shackling can cause PTSD, \u201cgeneral mental state deterioration,\u201d bedsores, bleeding, blood clotting and infection. The Mount Sinai psychiatrists write that the practice can \u201ccause immense and severe physical and psychological harm to patients and impact clinicians\u2019 abilities to provide appropriate treatment at a time of acute and particular need.\u201d<\/p>\n Dr. Elizabeth Ford, a psychiatrist and former consultant to the city\u2019s public hospital system about care for people under arrest, said that shackles are so stressful to patients that they cause the very outbursts they are intended to control.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s this general sense that if you take the cuffs off, someone is going to be more aggressive,\u201d said Dr. Ford, who is now the director of justice-involved behavioral health at Columbia University\u2019s psychiatry department. \u201cMy experience has been the opposite.\u201d<\/p>\n Formally, the lawsuit argued on Wednesday appeals a judge\u2019s denial of a writ of habeas corpus, the basic legal safeguard for challenging improper detention.<\/p>\n Louis M.\u2019s lawyers filed the habeas motion<\/a> in 2024 against the Police Department and Jacobi Medical Center to seek his unshackling. Two lower courts held that habeas did not apply because the motion sought only release from restraints, not total release from the hospital.<\/p>\n At Wednesday\u2019s argument, some of the judges seemed troubled by the notion that indefinite shackling was a standard police procedure. But they appeared unconvinced that a habeas corpus petition was the right way to challenge it, suggesting in their questions that other, more elaborate legal procedures might be more appropriate. The court is not expected to rule for weeks, at least.<\/p>\n The city notes that when Jacobi initially sought a court order to have Louis M. involuntarily held, a psychiatrist testified that he had a history of aggression and paranoia that could recur. He also grew \u201cextremely angry\u201d when asked why he had stopped taking medication, according to court records.<\/p>\n But the legal service says that while Louis M. was in the ward, his clinicians found him \u201ccalm and cooperative.\u201d<\/p>\n State mental hygiene law<\/a> and guidelines<\/a> say that psychiatric patients should generally be restrained only on a doctor\u2019s orders. Restraints must typically be removed after two hours, and kept off except for patients who are making \u201covert gestures\u201d threatening themselves or others.<\/p>\n Marcia Richard, a woman with a history of mental illness and drug addiction, said in an interview that she was often shackled by the police in locked wards in New York City, for periods of up to a week.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I went into the bathroom, that\u2019s the only time they took the handcuffs off, but they\u2019d keep the shackles on,\u201d said Ms. Richard, 56, who now works as a peer counselor. \u201cI showered in the shackles. I washed up in the shackles.\u201d<\/p>\n Sometimes, she said, the restraints injured her: \u201cI had cuts on my wrists, I had cuts on my ankles. Sometimes they were too tight, and your feet are swollen.\u201d<\/p>\n The city argues in its court papers that shackling prevents patients from being violent to hospital staff.<\/p>\n But Louis M.\u2019s lawyers argue that locked, guarded psychiatric wards are \u201cstaffed and equipped to manage behavioral outbursts.\u201d Techniques used in these wards to calm patients include verbal de-escalation, medication and seclusion.<\/p>\n Laureena Novotnak, the Mental Hygiene Legal Service lawyer who argued at the Court of Appeals, said in an interview that by definition, people are placed in locked psychiatric wards because they\u2019re \u201chaving trouble controlling their behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n She added, \u201cMaybe it would be safer if you chained all the patients around the clock, but nobody would ever get better.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One May afternoon in 2024, a 49-year-old homeless man with a long history of mental illness stood in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":239293,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[128,2949,1948,18671,33568,93483,9,24,63,83622,11771,129,131,130],"class_list":["post-239292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-the-bronx","tag-bronx","tag-bronx-nyc","tag-hospitals","tag-jacobi-medical-center","tag-mental-health-and-disorders","tag-mental-hygiene-legal-service-nys","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-psychiatry-and-psychiatrists","tag-suits-and-litigation-civil","tag-the-bronx","tag-the-bronx-headlines","tag-the-bronx-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239292\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/239293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}