The Legal Aid Society has created a database of wrongdoing of 3,000 New York Police Department officers. Eventually the database can be used by defense attorneys to question the credibility of officers in court.
The goal of the Legal Aid Society project is to provide a clearing-house for records of police misconduct to share with defense lawyers all over the city. NYPD does not make such information public.
Throughout the United States, police departments are being criticized for their lack of transparency. The Legal Aid’s database is an attempt to track officers with a history of civil rights violations and other kinds of misconduct. This information will force judges, prosecutors and juries to take officers’ past actions into consideration when adjudicating cases. If a defense attorney can successfully call into question the credibility of an arresting officer, a defense attorney may be able to convince a judge to let a defendant out of jail without bail or even dismiss the case entirely. Police misconduct can also serve as a bargaining chip during plea negotiations.
Detective Sekou Bourne is currently being prosecuted in NYPD’s administrative court for allegedly improperly frisking a woman and unlawfully entering her home in 2013 after concluding she had crack cocaine in her hand. Justine Luongo, the attorney-in-charge of the Legal Aid Society’s criminal practice, did a search in the database that brought up reports of seven civil rights lawsuits that had been filed against the detective. All the cases ended in settlements. This information could be useful for defense attorneys when prosecutors try to build a case against someone based on Bourne’s testimony.
The impetus for the database came from Cynthia Conti-Cook, a former civil rights lawyer. She says when a criminal case begins, typically there is a “big red arrow that says ‘criminal’ pointing to the defendant” and not much a defense attorney can say other than “my client denies the charges.” With the database, a lawyer can quickly discover records of past misconduct by the accusing officer if they exist. With that information in hand, defense attorneys can “start shifting that red arrow toward the police officer, by showing that they’ve also been engaged in activity that deteriorates their credibility.”
Conti-Cook added, “It takes the judge’s attention away from what your client did wrong to get here and puts more of a burden on the police officer to prove that your client actually did something.”
Legal Aid wants to encourage a comprehensive uploading of information to the system such a complaints being dismissed that could not be substantiated and making note of outcomes.
