The Lawyers Protecting the N.Y.P.D. Play Hardball. Judges Are Calling Them Out.
In one case, lawyers for the City of New York missed several filing deadlines and disobeyed court orders. An angry federal judge said they had “blown off” instructions, which he said was “outrageous.”
In another case, lawyers from the same legal unit never fully investigated an excessive-force complaint against the police and then neglected 14 orders to produce discovery evidence. A judge called their behavior “egregious.”
In a third case, the city lawyers took more than a year to give a man who had sued the police a recording of his questioning from the day of his arrest. The prolonged delay, a judge remarked, was “negligent, if not grossly negligent.”
All of the lawyers worked for what is known as the Special Federal Litigation Division, an elite team in the city’s Law Department that deals with some of the most important and politically sensitive cases the city has to fight: allegations of police misconduct.
Special Fed, as the team is often called, has great success in defeating suits against the police and corrections officers. But it has also been repeatedly accused by civil-rights lawyers — and at least six federal judges — of engaging in a pattern of obstructionist behavior.
City officials note that Special Fed has received judicial censure in only a fraction of the 1,400 cases the unit is currently handling. Each of those cases is complex, they say, often including dozens of requests for discovery materials that can tax the roughly 100 lawyers on the team.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/the-lawyers-protecting-the-nypd-play-hardball-judges-are-calling-them-out/ar-BBNfdOo?li=BBnb7Kz
= new reply since forum marked as read
