SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
rikers island
Trump Justice Department Moves to Complete 'Openly Corrupt Legal Bailout' of Eric Adams
"The Adams case confirms that as long as Bondi is in office, the rule of law will be subordinate to Trump's personal motivations."
Feb 15, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump's Justice Department formally moved Friday night to drop charges against Democratic New York City Mayor Eric Adams after at least seven federal prosecutors resigned, refusing to carry out what's been described as an "openly corrupt legal bailout."
In a new filing signed by veteran prosecutor Edward Sullivan, the Department of Justice requested "dismissal without prejudice of the charges" against Adams, who was indicted last year on multiple counts of wire fraud, bribery, and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations after an investigation that began in 2021. "Without prejudice" means the charges could be brought again.
It's an open question how Dale Ho, the judge overseeing the case, will respond. Some experts say he could reject the DOJ's request on the grounds that it is politically motivated.
The Justice Department, led by Attorney General Pam Bondi and Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, has said openly that its push to dismiss the charges against Adams has nothing to do with the "strength of the evidence" against Adams.
Rather, the decision is a remarkably transparent effort to ensure the New York City mayor's full cooperation with Trump's anti-immigrant agenda.
Sullivan reportedly signed the new Justice Department filing under significant duress. According to Reuters, Bove "told the department's career public integrity prosecutors in a meeting on Friday that they had an hour to decide among themselves who would file the motion," signaling they would all be fired if no one capitulated.
"The volunteer was Ed Sullivan, a veteran career prosecutor, who agreed to alleviate pressure on his colleagues in the department's public integrity section," Reutersreported, citing two unnamed sources. "Sullivan's decision came after the attorneys in the meeting contemplated resigning en masse, rather than filing the motion to dismiss... There are approximately 30 attorneys in the Public Integrity Section."
"I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me."
Brewing opposition inside the Justice Department exploded into public view this week as prosecutors opted to step down rather than carry out the DOJ leadership's orders to seek dismissal of the Adams charges.
Danielle Sassoon, former interim U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York who announced her departure earlier this week, wrote in a letter to Bondi on February 12 that she was "baffled by the rushed and superficial process" by which the decision to drop the charges against Adams was reached, "in seeming collaboration with Adams' counsel and without my direct input."
In a footnote of the letter, Sassoon described a meeting she and members of her team attended with Bove—who previously served as a member of Trump's personal legal team—and Adams' counsel.
"Adams' attorneys repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo, indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the department's enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed," Sassoon wrote. "Mr. Bove admonished a member of my team who took notes during that meeting and directed the collection of those notes at the meeting's conclusion."
Shortly before the Justice Department submitted its new filing on Friday, Hagan Scotten, a federal prosecutor assigned to the Adams case, announced his resignation in a scathing letter to Bove.
"No system of ordered liberty can allow the government to use the carrot of dismissing charges, or the stick of threatening to bring them again, to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives," Scotten wrote. "Any assistant U.S. attorney would know
that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way."
"If no lawyer within earshot of the president is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion," he added. "But it was never going to be me."
Ahead of the DOJ's filing, Adams appeared on "Fox & Friends" alongside Trump immigration czar Tom Homan in what one observer characterized as a hostage video "broadcast live on national television."
During the segment, Homan smilingly threatened that if Adams "doesn't come through" for the Trump administration, "we won't be sitting on a couch; I'll be in his office, up his butt, saying, 'Where the hell is the agreement we came to?'"
In a separate sitdown with Homan on Thursday, Adams committed to "return federal immigration agents to the Rikers Island jail complex in New York City," Politicoreported.
Thinly veiled Homan warning to Adams: “If he doesn’t come through … I’ll be in his office, up his butt, saying, Where the hell is the agreement we came to” pic.twitter.com/Pq0msJXZGb
— Emily Ngo (@emilyngo) February 14, 2025
In a column on Friday, The American Prospect's Ryan Cooper and David Dayen wrote that it is "striking just how awesomely gratuitous this all is."
"Nixon sacked his attorney general because the investigation was closing in on him personally and he wanted to escape. It was corrupt, but it made sense as a desperate last-ditch effort," they wrote. "Trump is letting Adams off the hook because he wants a stooge dependent on his goodwill in the mayor's seat while his deportation goons run riot in New York. That's a modest benefit at best; the mayor has limited tools to prevent ICE operations, though he's already offered up Rikers Island, the notorious prison that was due to close, as a migrant detention center."
"And it shows that the most willing enabler of Trump corruption in the entire government is Attorney General Bondi," Cooper and Dayen added. "This is approximately how she ran the Justice Department in Florida, doing favors for her donors and allies while firing attorneys in the department who got in the way, like the prosecutors looking into foreclosure fraud. The Adams case confirms that as long as Bondi is in office, the rule of law will be subordinate to Trump's personal motivations."
Keep ReadingShow Less
New York Solitary Reforms A Critical First Step to Addressing Mass Incarceration
Dec 24, 2015
Last week, the New York Civil Liberties Union announced a major settlement that overhauls solitary confinement in state prisons: As many as 1,100 people will get out of solitary confinement, and the agreement creates a framework for getting even more prisoners out of extreme isolation over the 5-year term of the contract.
This represents a huge culture shift inside New York prisons, where previously, many of the 4,000 people in solitary spent months or even years in windowless cells the size of parking spaces for non-violent rule violations like owning too many postage stamps.
But real and comprehensive reform of solitary isn't just about doing away with solitary for non-violent acts and vulnerable prisoners. Meaningful reform will have to tackle the way we deal with violence in prison, too. New York's settlement doesn't just deal with the low-hanging fruit. The agreement also requires New York to deal more humanely and effectively with the "toughest cases" by requiring reforms even for people who commit serious acts of violence in prison. These are the people who often face the longest solitary sentences. For the first time, under the agreement, these individuals will have universal access to rehabilitative counselors and educational instructors, including therapy, to get at the root of their actions.
After decades of relying on punitive solitary that time and again has produced dismal results both for safety and human dignity, there is something a bit revolutionary about trying to break the cycle of violence with rehabilitation rather than with deprivation and isolation. This settlement acknowledges that for people engaged in a cycle of serious violence, improving public safety demands giving them the most intensive rehabilitation instead of locking them up and throwing away the key.
The success of these solitary reforms can provide a framework for handling a parallel problem: mass incarceration. Both movements will fall short if they only address non-violent offenders, as I discuss in a recent Marshall Project piece,
Successfully reforming solitary could show the way for a more radical downsizing of our prisons and jails, by persuading crime victims, policymakers and the public that a less punitive strategy -- shorter sentences, real rehabilitation -- can deliver both safety and accountability.
Just as removing the vulnerable and non-violent from extreme isolation units will not eliminate solitary confinement, removing drug users and other non-violent offenders will not solve the problem of mass incarceration. In both cases, to achieve the sweeping reforms we need, there must be a new approach to violence.
You can read the rest of the Marshall Project piece here.
Keep ReadingShow Less
End All Youth Detention and Torture at Rikers Island Now
Jun 14, 2015
Solitary confinement is pretty horrible for anybody, but it's especially horrible for a child. It is psychological torture.
-- Bryan Stevenson, Founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, author of Just Mercy
When you go over the three years that he spent [in jail] and all the horrific details he endured, it's unbelievable that this could happen to a teenager in New York City. He didn't get tortured in some prison camp in another country. It was right here!
-- Paul V. Prestia, Kalief Browder's lawyer to The New Yorker
Before I went to jail, I didn't know about a lot of stuff, and, now that I'm aware, I'm paranoid. I feel like I was robbed of my happiness.
-- Kalief Browder to Jennifer Gonnerman, staff writer for The New Yorker
Nobody of any age should be held in jail without a trial for three years. No child or adolescent should be held in an adult jail. No child or youth should be housed in facilities where those entrusted to care for them violently assault them. Yet, a 16-year-old accused of stealing a backpack was kept in one of the most violent adult jails in the United States, Rikers Island in New York City, for three years without a trial. This was morally scandalous and inhumane. Even worse, he spent more than two years of that time in solitary confinement, locked up alone except to go to the shower, the recreation area, the visit room or the medical clinic. This was torture. The suicide of 22-year-old Kalief Browder on June 6, barely two years after his release and return home, was the final horror in his tragic and brutal journey into the depths of the adult criminal justice system in New York City and state.
At Rikers, Kalief was cruelly beaten by juvenile gangs, and beaten by a guard as he was calmly walking from solitary confinement to the shower. This violent abuse was caught on video and made public in April by an investigative reporter from The New Yorker. Other alleged abuses were not: The cruel guards who denied him meals, medical care, trips to the shower and extended his time in solitary confinement by making up disciplinary problems.
It should surprise no one that a teenager subjected to this continuous torture; a teenager who maintained his innocence and just wanted his right to a day in court to prove it; a teenager who turned down plea deals repeatedly although it would have meant he could go home immediately; a teenager with no history of mental illness before Rikers Island tried to commit suicide while held in solitary confinement for two of his three years there. It is beyond shameful that he was held without a trial, without being proven guilty and because he was a poor young Black male. This travesty was and is preventable and must be prevented for all youths at risk of such abuse.
If New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and state legislators act immediately before this state legislative session ends June 17, 2015 to raise the age of criminal responsibility, as 48 states have done, more tragedies and suffering like Kalief Browder's might be avoided. And youths still at Rikers might have reduced suffering and pain.
Kalief Browder's cruel and unjust treatment began May 15, 2010, when he was picked up with a friend in the Bronx. He shared his story later with a reporter from The New Yorker to make sure this would never happen to anyone else. Kalief was stopped for allegedly stealing a backpack earlier that evening. According to the report, he maintained his innocence and offered to let the police search his pockets. The only evidence against him was the testimony of the alleged victim he never got the chance to confront. Eyewitness identification is notoriously unreliable.
Kalief Browder was immediately funneled into the adult criminal justice system because of the unjust lottery of geography and poverty. New York remains one of only two states in our country that still automatically treats 16- and 17-year-olds as adults. More than a century ago, states began to legislate that children should be treated as children to prevent the inhumane, dangerous, and ineffective practice of putting them in adult jails. New York and North Carolina should end this practice immediately. Not one more young life should be ruined or tragically lost to Rikers preventable torture and violence.
We have long known that putting children in adult jails puts them in harm's way. The Children's Defense Fund (CDF) first documented and began advocating for changes to end these harms nearly 40 years ago after visiting 500 jails across America and publishing in 1976 our deeply disturbing findings in a report on Children in Adult Jails. We found children incarcerated with adults suffered increased rates of physical abuse, like Kalief did. Today they are 36 times more likely to commit suicide than those in juvenile facilities. In light of this evidence, it is outrageous that any state today would subject its teenagers to any adult jail especially like Rikers Island whose culture of violence is notorious. New York must stop right now.
The unjust criminalization of the poor is another reason Kalief Browder ended up at Rikers Island. His family could not afford to hire an attorney or pay the $3,000 bail to keep him home to await a trial that never took place over three long years. Being poor, Black and male, the odds were high that he would end up in the Cradle to Prison PipelineTM and suffer preventable death.
Dr. Sean Joe, the Benjamin E. Youngdahl Professor of Social Development at the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis, and an authority on suicidal behavior among African American males, says that among Black Americans, Black males between the ages of 15 to 24 are most likely to commit suicide. "The suicide of Kalief Browder highlights the glaring gap between the alarming psychiatric needs of black boys and men and the absence of effective treatments; a justice system that enacted psychological torture because a putative stolen backpack mattered more than the life and future of a black teen; and the importance to address the unattended psychological consequences resulting from the feverous adjudication, prosecution, and sentencing of black boys and men without regard for their mental health."
More than a thousand days after arriving at Rikers Island, Kalief Browder was abruptly released four days after his 20th birthday. He had spent most of the 17 previous months in solitary confinement. The charges against him were dismissed. It is unclear when the only evidence against him disappeared, and when and if the "victim" had returned to Mexico and could no longer be found. Two years later, after more suicide attempts and mental health hospitalizations, Kalief Browder took his life at home. He was 22-years-old.
His tragically short life has already made a difference. Mayor Bill de Blasio led New York City to ban solitary confinement for all juveniles when he heard Kalief's story. But the Governor and state legislature without another moment's delay must also take action on the age at which children can be placed in adult jails as the Governor's Commission on Youth, Public Safety and Justice recommended. No other child or youth should be at risk of Kalief Browder's fate and our nation needs to change the way we treat Black boys and men and recognize that all lives matter equally.
Albert Camus, the great French Nobel Literature Laureate, speaking at a Dominican Monastery in 1948 said: "Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children." He described our responsibility as human beings "if not to reduce evil, at least not to add to it" and "to refuse to consent to conditions which torture innocents." "I continue," he said "to struggle against this universe in which children suffer and die." And so must every one of us including our elected officials who must be held accountable. Only then will the cries of the prophets for justice and peace and America's pretentions to be a just nation become a lasting reality.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular