New York State Moves to Dismiss Hundreds of Prison Sexual Assault Lawsuits
by Jo Ellen Knott
In a calculated effort to evade liability for systemic custodial sexual violence, lawyers for New York State plan to ask judges to dismiss approximately 500 prison sexual assault lawsuits based on minor clerical technicalities, according to New York Focus.
These cases, filed under the Adult Survivors Act (ASA), target the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) for decades of alleged abuse. However, the Attorney General’s office is exploiting the Court of Claims’ archaic and rigid filing requirements to “slam the courthouse doors” on survivors. A particularly egregious example involves plaintiff Ernastiaze Moore, whose suit was tossed due to a single-year typo in his complaint, a mistake that was also made by DOCCS staff in their own internal reports. Despite video evidence showing Moore screaming as guards sexually assaulted him, Judge Catherine Schaewe ruled the typo a “jurisdictional defect.”
This legal maneuver relies on 1930s-era statutes requiring absolute specificity regarding dates and locations, details which are often obscured by the very trauma the ASA was designed to address. While legislators have introduced bills to exempt survivors from these “stumbling blocks,” the state is currently weaponizing “absolute exactness” to avoid billions in potential damages. As managing attorney Konstantin Yelisavetskiy of the law firm Slater Slater Schulman (which represents over 1,200 people alleging prison abuse under the Adult Survivors Act) noted, without changing the statutes, “hundreds of abuse survivors risk being denied the day in court that the ASA was designed to guarantee them.”
Source: New York Focus
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