New York City has one memento from the Republican national convention that seems destined to last: an especially bitter dispute over the city's methods and motives in detaining hundreds of protesters, well beyond the ordinary legal time limit of 24 hours, and without the usual access to lawyers.
At times, the Police Department kept people in custody for two days or more before issuing them tickets for offenses like disorderly conduct.
Led by a vigorous defense from Mayor Michael Bloomberg, city officials say they did their best under a sudden and extraordinary flood of arrests, ac-knowledging that bystanders may have been swept up. Law-yers for a number of protesters say what the city did amounted to illegal preventive detention, a calculated effort to limit the chances of confrontation and possible embarrassment.
The full dimensions of the dispute may emerge in a contempt-of-court hearing for the city on Sept. 27, and in civil lawsuits that have been filed or are threatened.
What is clear now -- from interviews, a review of newly released city and state records, and a decision from a previously undisclosed court hearing -- is that the city's new system for speedy processing of mass arrests failed its first major test that week.
At least one of the city's major justifications for delays in releasing protesters is not supported by state records. In addition, the city chose not to abide by a state judge's direct order to grant lawyers immediate access to their clients. When another judge gave deadlines for the release of certain prisoners who had been held at length, top city officials repeatedly came back to court to report that they could not track the prisoners down in time. There were 1,781 arrests in all.
While Bloomberg has accurately noted that prosecutors have dropped very few of the arrests, it is also true that more than 600 of the cases have been provisionally dismissed, indicating that the police detention amounted to a more severe punishment than any of the courts would impose.
The city's top lawyer, Michael Cardozo, told a judge that much of the delay was not caused by the city, since it took "five or six hours to get the fingerprints from Albany," referring to criminal history records maintained by the state.
Yet state officials have a different story. They say that they sent 94 percent of the fingerprint reports to the city in one hour or less. Only one set of fingerprints -- of 3,620 processed by the state from Aug. 30 to Sept. 3 -- took as long as five hours to return to New York City authorities, according to a computer report provided by Jessica Scaperotti, a spokeswoman for the state's Division of Criminal Justice Services.
Numerous lawyers said they could not see their clients while they were in city custody. That state of affairs persisted even after a state Supreme Court judge in Manhattan, Emily Goodman, drove to the courthouse at midnight on Sept. 1 and signed an order requiring the city to allow defense lawyers to meet their clients "forthwith."
Yet when defense lawyers delivered her order to corrections guards at a jail in the courthouse at 2:30am on Sept. 2, they were kept waiting nearly two hours and then were denied entry, according to Daniel Alterman, one of the lawyers.
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