If Kafka had lived in today’s New York, he might have recognized the nasty little tale of Nicholas Bowen and the wrongful warrant that would not go away.
The story opens on a Wednesday night in November 2008. Bowen, an unemployed Brooklyn man in his early 50s, spent the evening at a friend’s apartment in public housing in the Bronx. The next morning, he took his friend’s son to school and then, as he returned to the projects, was arrested on suspicion of trespassing.
Although Bowen’s criminal citation was eventually dismissed (on the condition that he not commit a crime for a year), state Supreme Court in the Bronx, for unknown reasons, issued a warrant for the charge.
Bowen said he never knew about the warrant until almost three months later, when he received a call about it from the police. He said that shortly after the call, he went to court again and on Feb. 11, 2009, a second judge determined that the warrant was erroneous and the matter was dismissed.
“I thought it was over, but it just went on and on and on and on,” Bowen, now 58, said the other day.
That, if you were counting, was four ons — one, as it turns out, for each of the arrests that the ostensibly excised warrant led to over the next several years.
The first occurred a few months after Bowen’s February court date when, according to a police report, he was riding his red Schwinn bicycle to a psychiatrist’s appointment and pulled up onto the sidewalk in Brooklyn.
He was stopped by the police, who asked for his identification, and when the officers ran it through the system, they found the warrant.
Bowen spent several days on Rikers Island before having a hearing about the warrant, and when he finally saw a judge, court papers say, he was summarily released.
Months went by. Then, on Nov. 13, 2010, Bowen was stopped by the police a second time.
On this occasion, records show, he received a summons for public drinking.
Once again, an officer asked for his ID. Once again, Bowen produced it. Once again, he was arrested on suspicion of evading the open warrant. And once again, when he finally appeared in court, a judge determined that the warrant should never have been issued and had, at any rate, already been closed.
This time, the judge even gave Bowen an official document that said the warrant had been dismissed.
According to court records, the judge advised Bowen to show the piece of paper to the police if they tried to arrest him again over the warrant.
Which is exactly what he did on Sept. 2, 2012, when he was stopped by the police for a third time — for being at a playground after dark.
The earlier situations were repeated: Bowen was asked for his ID and the warrant was found in the system.
However, even when he produced the judge’s letter, the police ignored it, court papers say.
Bowen was arrested and taken into custody overnight.
“It was always the same,” he said. “They’d ask for my ID. I’d show them my ID. Then off I’d go.”
The final episode took place in July 2013, when Bowen and a girlfriend were riding home from Coney Island on the subway. It was a sweltering afternoon, the air-conditioning in their car was out and Bowen, still recovering from recent hernia surgery, was suffering from the heat.
So he, his girlfriend and several other passengers, walked between two cars while the train was in motion, he said. The police were in the second car, and saw them, he said.
According to a police report, Bowen was stopped, asked for his ID and taken into custody over the warrant, but as he was being booked, he told the police that because of his surgery, he needed medication.
So a police officer took Bowen to New York Methodist Hospital where, court papers say, he was placed in shackles and then eventually fell asleep.
When he woke up, the police ordered to him leave, according to the lawsuit Bowen later filed.
When Bowen said he had more questions for a doctor, the police removed him from gurney and dragged him, in handcuffs, more than 12m, the papers say.
On the morning after the fracas, Judge Craig Walker of Criminal Court in Brooklyn looked into both the warrant, finding it erroneous, and Bowen’s exculpatory letter, finding it authentic.
Turning to the defendant, Walker said: “So hopefully, Mr. Bowen, this will fully take care of it.”
It did not, and with the warrant still pending, Bowen sued New York City in federal court in Manhattan on Oct. 15, 2014, saying that he had been repeatedly and wrongfully arrested.
Within weeks, the case was moved to Brooklyn, and in March last year, on his first appearance before Judge Lois Bloom, the defendant-turned-plaintiff, acting as his own lawyer, laid out the story of the undead warrant and the anguish it had caused.
“I’m hoping to accomplish some justice,” he said.
When Bloom told Bowen that she would help him find a lawyer, he broke down in tears.
“It’s just every time I go through this here, I get upset,” he said.
The next month, at a second hearing, Bloom became upset.
“This is a case that really needs attention,” she told a lawyer for the city, Daniel Saavedra. “That he has to carry around a paper from a judge saying that a warrant is a mistake should not be the way any citizen has to live.”
The New York City Department of Law said in a statement last week that the police removed the warrant from their system as soon as they had been informed of the error, but that did not happen until April last year, after Bowen filed the suit.
City officials alerted Bloom to the change with a note bearing the prolix title: “Letter respectfully informing the Court that plaintiff’s open warrant has been removed from the Automated Database Warrant System.”
Although Bowen versus the City of New York is only one man’s story, the case happens to be moving through the courts as local law enforcement tries to reform the warrant system.
The New York City Police Department says that there are now more than 1 million open criminal warrants, some dating back to the early 1980s.
This month, the city started an initiative to issue summonses to — rather than arrest — offenders with warrants for quality-of-life crimes like littering, unreasonable noise and public urination.
The Brooklyn district attorney’s office has undertaken a similar effort called Begin Again, through which defendants can close their pending warrants simply by showing up to acknowledge them.
As for Nicholas Bowen, belated relief has been mixed with incredulity.
“It’s a joke — the whole thing’s been a joke,” he said the other day with a disbelieving laugh. “I didn’t really think that it was happening, until it happened over and over again.”
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