A Manhattan federal judge in a long-running lawsuit against the city’s beleaguered  Department of Correction said Wednesday that a third-party receiver should be appointed to oversee use-of-force and safety issues in the city’s jails. 

Laura Taylor Swain, chief district judge for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, cited nine years of failed promises by jail officials in her 65-page decision. 

“The glacial pace of reform can be explained by an unfortunate cycle demonstrated by DOC leadership, which has changed materially a number of times over the life of the Court’s orders, wherein initiatives are created, changed in some material way or abandoned, and then restarted,” she wrote. 

She ruled that fining the city or taking other measures to force reforms would not be enough. 

“The Court is inclined to impose a receivership: namely, a remedy that will make the management of the use of force and safety aspects of the Rikers Island jails ultimately answerable directly to the court,” she said. 

Mayor Eric Adams and his jail officials have strenuously opposed the push for a possible receivership takeover. 

They’ve cited a decrease in in-custody deaths and some other improvements since Lynelle Maginley-Liddie was appointed commissioner in December 2023. 

But Swain said the positive steps aren’t nearly enough. 

“The record in this case makes clear that those who live and work in the jails on Rikers Island are faced with grave and immediate threats of danger, as well as actual harm, on a daily basis as a direct result of Defendants’ lack of diligence,” she ruled. 

Swain also found the Adams istration in “civil contempt of eighteen provisions” designed to improve conditions for city detainees.  

As a result, Swain wants to get both sides to agree on how much power the receiver will have and who that person will be, according to the decision.  

The Legal Aid Society, which brought the original “Nunez” case in 2011, and city and federal lawyers must hash out how the receiver would work, she added. 

That includes deciding whether the receiver “would supplant or work alongside the DOC commissioner.” 

All sides also must flesh out how long the receiver should remain in power and the qualifications for that person, according to Swain’s decision.  

The parties must file a status report detailing “proposed framework for a receivership” by Jan. 14, she ruled. 

A ‘Culture of Brutality’

Legal experts say a receiver can be granted extraordinary powers and would technically not be required to follow union contracts — meaning everything from job protections to work hours could be on the line across the correction department.

The push for a receiver is also ed by Manhattan’s top federal prosecutor, Damian Williams. The Nunez case, named after the defendant, was first filed by his office under predecessor Preet Bharara. 

“This is a historic decision,” said The Legal Aid Society and Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel LLP, counsel for plaintiffs, in a statement. 

“The culture of brutality on Rikers Island has resisted judicial and political reform efforts for years,” the statement added. “Unconstitutional use of force in the jails has only worsened in the nearly nine years since the parties entered into the Nunez consent decree.” 

Swain’s decision noted how jail officials have for nearly a decade repeatedly promised to improve conditions and enact a series of reforms, including under a court-appointed monitor put in place in 2015. 

“The last nine years also leave no doubt that continued insistence on compliance with the Court’s orders by persons answerable principally to political authorities would lead only to confrontation and delay,” she ruled.  

The city has “fallen short of the requisite compliance with Court orders for years, at times under circumstances that suggest bad faith; and that enormous resources—that the City devotes to a system that is at the same time overstaffed and underserved—are not being deployed effectively,” she added. 

Swain also cited a spike in deaths since Adams took office nearly three years ago. 

Nineteen people died in 2022, nine more died in 2023, and five died in the first eight months of 2024, DOC records show. 

Swain’s decision comes a day after Adams questioned the ambitious plan to close all the jails on Rikers and replace them with four modern facilities in each of the boroughs except for Staten Island. 

He noted that an estimated 51% of people locked up have some sort of mental health diagnosis with 18% dealing with severe mental health illness. He insists one of the new locations should be dedicated to those people who need help that typical incarceration can’t provide. 

“It’s not logical to me to create four smaller Rikers. I’ve called for this before, and I will call for it again,” he told reporters Tuesday.

“One of those jails should be a state-of-the-art mental health facility where people can get real care,” Adams said. “It is criminal that we are incarcerating people with severe mental health illness.”