Rikers Island - Alleged Abuses

Alleged Abuses

In February 2008, Correction Officer Lloyd Nicholson was indicted after he allegedly used a select group of teenage inmates as enforcers under a regime called "the program", as well as allegedly beat inmates himself. However, "the program" has been known to exist for well over a decade and is unique to the adolescents. The inmates use it as a test for other inmates and system of control amongst themselves.

On June 1, 2007, Captain Sherman Graham and Assistant Deputy Warden Gail Lewis were arrested by the New York City Department of Investigation (DOI) for covering up an assault on an inmate. The arrest came after both were indicted by a Bronx Grand Jury. It is alleged that on October 4, 2006, Graham assaulted an inmate after he refused to comply with strip searching procedures at the Robert N. Davoren Center (RNDC, C-74). The assault occurred in front of 15 Correction Academy Recruits in training. After the assault, Graham ordered the Recruits to write on their Use of Force Witness Reports that Graham assaulted the inmate in self-defense after the inmate punched Graham. Lewis, who was Graham’s supervisor, did not intervene to stop anything. Lewis also submitted a false Use of Force Witness Report. Charges against Graham include 16 counts of Falsifying Business Records, 16 counts of offering a False Instrument for Filing in the First Degree 16 counts of Official Misconduct, a class A misdemeanor and one count of Attempted Assault in the Third Degree. Lewis was charged with Falsifying Business Records, Offering a False Instrument for Filing and Official Misconduct. The investigation started when the DOI received a tip following an anti-corruption presentation at the Academy in October 2006 on the day before graduation.

Graham and Lewis were found guilty on all charges by a Bronx jury on May 14, 2012. It took the jury approximately three hours to deliberate a guilty verdict. Lewis was able to retire in December 2009 with her pension. Graham was terminated from the Corrections Department following the guilty verdict. Both face up to four years in prison when they are sentenced on July 9, 2012. Graham and Lewis were both sentenced to 500 hours of community service and ordered to pay $1,000.00 in fines on August 7, 2012 when they were sentenced.

On October 4, 2007, the New York City Department of Corrections conceded that "tens of thousands of nonviolent inmates taken to Rikers Island on misdemeanor charges had been wrongly strip-searched in violation of a 2002 court settlement, and were entitled to payment for damages. As many as 150,000 such inmates have been searched at Rikers Island since 2002, lawyers for the inmates said... The policy was kept in place despite a United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruling in 2001 that strip-searches of misdemeanor suspects were illegal, unless officials suspected that they were carrying contraband..."

Emery charged in his papers that department officials "repeatedly resorted to lying to cover up deliberate indifference to the continued practice of humiliating detainees by forcing them to strip naked in groups."

In an alleged July 2008 rape case reported by The Village Voice on August 5, 2008, the alleged victim claimed "that someone entered her cell in the 1,000-bed Rose M. Singer Center while she was asleep, sometime before 6 a.m. on July 3. She says the intruder (or intruders) bound and gagged her with bedsheets and then used a dildo-like object to sexually assault her. Other inmates may have acted as lookouts during the alleged assault. The woman, who was being held on grand-larceny charges for the past three months, was discovered at about 6 a.m. by an Officer and a Captain who were touring the building. The Officer saw her lying on her back on the floor of her cell with bedsheets wrapped around her neck, mouth, and legs. She had also been blindfolded. The incident was reported to central command at 7:30 a.m., and the woman was transported to the Elmhurst Hospital Center. Because she didn't share a cell with anyone, a major question is how the alleged assault happened in the first place. Officials won't talk about the investigation, and there's no word on whether any arrests have been made."

The same Village Voice article also lists a roll call of 2008 scandals at Rikers, including the case of Officers who allegedly passed accused cop killer Lee Woods marijuana, cigarettes, and alcohol; the February indictment of corrections officer Lloyd Nicholson who used inmates as "enforcers", and the April 27 suicide of 18-year-old Steven Morales (who had killed his infant daughter for crying too much) in the high-security closed-custody unit.

On February 3, 2009, The New York Times reported that "the pattern of cases suggests that city correction officials have been aware of a problem in which Rikers Officers have acquiesced or encouraged violence among inmates." The Times added that "There have been at least seven lawsuits filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan accusing Officers of complicity or acquiescence in inmate violence at Rikers, a complex of 10 detention facilities which, along with several other jails around the city, hold about 13,000 prisoners, most of whom are pretrial detainees. None of the seven suits have gone to trial. In the three that were settled, the city admitted no liability or wrongdoing."