$1.5 Million Settlement For In-Custody Injury by New York Police
Rosie Martinez, then 49, was arrested in January 2015 after police searched her New York City apartment and found heroin that belonged to her boyfriend. While in custody at the 107th Precinct of the City Police Department (NYPD), she suffered a serious injury to her hand. Martinez said officers had questioned her even after she requested an attorney, then violently assaulted her as she was handcuffed to a bench. Her boyfriend, in another cell, could hear her screaming in pain.
Martinez was then cuffed “extremely tightly,” as recalled in the complaint she later filed. For the next five hours her requests for medical care were disregarded, she said. Her injury was not reported or documented in any police records, nor was her mistreatment by the cops. When she arrived at Central Booking, a medical screener noticed her visible injuries and ordered her taken to a hospital. Afterward, several NYPD officials filed reports falsely stating that Martinez had hurt herself and “had been interviewed and denied officer misconduct.”
The assault left Martinez with permanent injuries. She filed suit in federal court for the Eastern District of New York in 2016 against the City of New York and both the NYPD officers involved, alleging violation of her due process rights, conspiracy, unreasonable force, assault and battery, negligence, infliction of intentional and negligent emotional distress, plus deliberate indifference and supervisory liability claims.
There were lengthy delays in the case due to discovery violations by Defendants, including delays in identifying the officers who assaulted Martinez, plus further delays in producing over 1,000 pages from three police investigations—all of which the City had flatly denied ever happened. Citing this “unprecedented and disturbing pattern of delay” by the City Law Department, a federal magistrate noted that there may have been a cover-up and recommended sanctions in January 2018 for the City’s “pattern of willful noncompliance with the Court’s Orders and basic discovery obligations.” The Court then adopted some, though not all of those recommendations in its order on April 18, 2018. See: Martinez v. City of N.Y., 2018 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 66106 (E.D.N.Y.).
The case went to trial in November 2022. Martinez described how two officers became angry while she was being questioned and “proceeded to choke her, slap her, stomp on her feet, pull her hair, and bend back her right thumb in retaliation for her failure to tell [them] the information they wanted to hear” about her boyfriend’s drug dealing. She also presented evidence that one of the cops lied to NYPD investigators about two other arrests he had made, and several other officers had provided false information, she showed.
The jury returned a verdict in favor of Martinez on December 13, 2022, awarding her $200,000 in compensatory damages against the City of New York for assault and battery, plus $1.00 in nominal damages and $400,000 in punitive damages against the officers on her deliberate indifference claims. Defendants filed a Fed.R.Civ.P. Rule 50 motion for judgment as a matter of law, plus a motion for remittitur under Rule 59. Both were denied in a ruling on July 19, 2023. The district court also held the cops were not entitled to qualified immunity.
An appeal to that decision was filed at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. While it was pending, the parties agreed to settle the case on November 30, 2023. Martinez received $600,001, while $899,999 went toward fees and costs owed to her attorneys with Elefterakis, Elefterakis & Panek in Manhattan. See: Martinez v. City of N.Y., USDC (E.D.N.Y.), Case No. 1:16-cv-00079.
The appeal was then dismissed on November 30, 2023. See: Martinez v. City of N.Y., 2023 U.S. App. LEXIS 35425 (2d Cir.). A request by PLN for documentation of the settlement was finally granted in September 2024.
Additional source: New York Times
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