criminal and civil complaints filed in Federal District Court in
San Jose, Calif.
Department of Justice criminal complaint
After
Budget Cuts,
Defendants’ Wait to See a Judge Often Exceeds 24 Hours
July 19,
2011
The New York Times
By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN
In
Brooklyn, a night in jail often lasts longer than one night. Sometimes it can
drag out over two or even three nights.
Last month, the city’s criminal courts reduced their weekend hours, shortening
shifts in response to state budget cuts. Court officials promised to monitor the
dockets “hour by hour and day by day” to ensure that prisoners were arraigned
promptly.
But the result has been what defense lawyers feared: People arrested may wait
for days before appearing in front of a judge, particularly in Brooklyn Criminal
Court, which handles the highest volume of arraignments.
State law requires that the authorities bring defendants before a judge “without
unnecessary delay,” which the state’s highest court has interpreted to mean 24
hours under normal conditions.
But in Brooklyn, many defendants arrested on relatively minor charges are
waiting far longer. The backlog grows on weekends, when arrest numbers climb and
the courts scale back their hours.
Andre Parker, 45, a construction worker, was arrested Friday evening for tossing
a lottery ticket to the ground and then refusing a police officer’s order to
pick it up or show his identification, according to the officer’s account. Mr.
Parker said he was not arraigned until Sunday afternoon. While waiting in a
holding cell in the courthouse, another person “was throwing up blood,” Mr.
Parker said.
When Mr. Parker was finally arraigned, the judge said his case would be
dismissed if he stayed out of trouble for six months, a common disposition for
low-level offenses.
“It took me three days,” Mr. Parker said of the time he spent waiting to see a
judge. “It was ridiculous.”
On Tuesday, court officials pledged to add more hours to weekend shifts to
increase the number of arraignments in Brooklyn Criminal Court. “We recognize
that it was certainly not acceptable to continue on the current path,” David
Bookstaver, a spokesman for the state’s Office of Court Administration, said.
On average, the time between arrest and arraignment in Brooklyn during recent
weekends was just under 31 hours, according to statistics provided by the
mayor’s office. Last summer, before the courts reduced their hours, the average
time was just over 24 hours on the same weekends.
By Monday morning, 170 of the 292 defendants waiting to see a judge in Brooklyn
Criminal Court had been arrested more than 24 hours earlier, according to
statistics provided by the Legal Aid Society. Some had been arrested on Friday.
“People shouldn’t be spending two or three days in jail” waiting to see a judge,
the mayor’s criminal justice coordinator, John Feinblatt, said in an interview.
Mr. Feinblatt has been urging the court system since last month to schedule more
time for arraignments.
“It’s not working,” he said of the courts’ reduced hours. “We’re left reaching
the obvious conclusion that we need to go back to a schedule that we had before
so that we can meet our legal obligations.”
Mr. Feinblatt added that the problem was not confined to Brooklyn.
“We’re seeing problems elsewhere, as well,” he said. The average
arrest-to-arraignment time on the weekend in all city courts was just over 26
hours.
Legal Aid lawyers said that abiding by the 24-hour arrest-to-arraignment time
limit was especially important in light of the large number of people arrested
for minor infractions that rarely result in prosecutors’ seeking jail time. In
one recent week, 294 people arraigned in Brooklyn Criminal Court had their cases
immediately dismissed or were given adjournments in contemplation of dismissal,
meaning their cases, like Mr. Parker’s, would be dismissed if they stayed out of
trouble for six months, according to statistics provided by Legal Aid.
In such cases, each day spent waiting in jail is one more day of incarceration
than the judge would have imposed.
“A lot of these people should never even spend an hour in central booking,” said
one lawyer, Julie Fry, who is vice president of the Brooklyn division of the
union representing Legal Aid lawyers.
In many instances, the police can decide whether to send someone they arrested
before a judge or to issue the person a court summons called a desk-appearance
ticket, thereby freeing the person after several hours of arrest.
In police slang, the tickets are dismissively referred to as “disappearance
tickets” because of the risk that the recipients will not show up for their
court dates. In Brooklyn, the number of desk-appearance tickets issued rose 39.5
percent between 2009 and 2010, according to statistics provided by the mayor’s
office.
March 28, 2011
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
LUBBOCK, Texas (AP) — A Texas college student from Saudi
Arabia who is accused of buying chemicals and equipment to build a weapon of
mass destruction is set to be arraigned.
The arraignment for Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari (al-daw-SAW'-ree) is scheduled for
Monday morning at the federal courthouse in Lubbock. He faces up to life in
prison if he's convicted of attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction.
Court documents allege he had hatched plans to attack various U.S. targets,
including New York City and former President George W. Bush's Dallas home.
Aldawsari was arrested Feb. 23. Court records indicate that federal agents
traced his online purchases, discovered extremist online posts he made and
secretly searched his apartment, computer and e-mail accounts and read his
diary.
PHOENIX — Jared L. Loughner, who the police said was responsible for the
shooting rampage outside a Tucson supermarket on Jan. 8, pleaded not guilty on
Monday to charges that he tried to murder Representative Gabrielle Giffords and
two of her aides.
Appearing in Federal District Court alongside his defense lawyer, Judy Clarke,
Mr. Loughner entered a written plea to Judge Larry A. Burns of San Diego without
uttering a word.
Dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit and wearing glasses, Mr. Loughner, 22,
smiled through most of the proceedings and chuckled when a clerk read out the
name of the case: the United States of America v. Jared Lee Loughner.
Ms. Clarke offered no objection to a request by Wallace Kleindienst, an
assistant United States attorney, to move the court proceedings to Tucson. But
Mr. Kleindienst, who is considered an expert in murder cases, indicated that Ms.
Clarke would have additional opportunities to push for the trial to be held
elsewhere.
The indictment unsealed against Mr. Loughner was preliminary, prosecutors have
said, and did not involve any of the other shooting victims. A superseding
indictment is expected to be filed after more investigation.
During the arraignment, which was conducted under high security, Judge Burns
asked Ms. Clarke whether she had any concerns about her client’s ability to
understand the case against him. “We are not raising any issues at this time,”
she said.
The prosecution on Monday turned over to Ms. Clarke records from Mr. Loughner’s
computer and transcripts of 250 witness interviews.
The shooting, which left six dead and 13 wounded, is expected to be addressed
during President Obama’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday, as several people
who helped the wounded have been invited to attend.
Daniel Hernandez, the intern who gave first aid to Ms. Giffords after she was
shot and who was called a hero by Mr. Obama during his speech in Tucson on Jan.
12, will attend, along with Peter Rhee, G. Michael Lemole Jr. and Randall S.
Friese, all doctors who treated her at University Medical Center, said C. J.
Karamargin, Ms. Giffords’s spokesman.
Also expected to be in attendance is Tracy Culbert, a trauma and intensive care
nurse who treated Ms. Giffords. On Friday, Ms. Culbert accompanied Ms. Giffords
on her flight to Houston, where her recovery is continuing in an intensive care
unit at Memorial Hermann hospital. When her health improves, she will be
transferred to the Institute for Rehabilitation and Research at Memorial
Hermann.
Over the weekend, Dr. John Holcomb, a trauma surgeon at Memorial Hermann, said
Ms. Giffords could not begin intensive rehabilitation right away. He said a
slight buildup of spinal fluid in her brain after her transfer by air to Houston
from Tucson on Friday made it impossible to shift her to the rehabilitation
center in the complex.
The congresswoman has a catheter draining fluid from her skull, part of which
was removed to relieve pressure after the shooting
Sam Dolnick and Ford Burkhart contributed reporting from Tucson,
and James C.
McKinley Jr. from Houston.
