Repeal 50-a
Civil Rights Law 50-a shields law enforcement from accountability. It must be repealed.
The battle for equal justice is fought on many fronts, and the activists and advocates you’ve been reading about here are working on a wide variety of issues: bail reform, re-entry for formerly incarcerated people, justice for victims of sexual assault, and getting rid of policies and risk assessment tools that disproportionately and unfairly target poor people and minorities, to name a few.
Today, I want to highlight an issue that’s of deep importance to New Yorkers who’ve been accused of a crime. In December, the ACLU lost a lawsuit that would have required law enforcement to disclose an officer’s history of disciplinary action to the public, including the defense attorneys for people accused of crimes. Right now, the law that allows the police to be exempt from New York’s Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) is Civil Rights Law 50-a, which is being so broadly interpreted as a privacy protection statute that it undermines the rights of the accused. And people who are accused of a crime should have a right to know whether officers who are testifying against them have a history of misconduct.
I recently co-authored a column in City & State with New York City Legal Aid Society staff attorney Cynthia Conti-Cook about the issue.
As we noted there: “50-a is the law that prevented Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner, from knowing whether the officers who killed her son had prior histories of misconduct. It is the law that the Police Benevolent Association believes should prevent body camera footage from being publicly accessible and aggregate statistics on force from being reported. It’s what shields police officers from public scrutiny at the expense of accountability, transparency and safety.”
We cannot have equal justice without accountability and transparency.
You can support us by signing this petition to ask the New York State Legislature and Governor Andrew Cuomo to repeal Civil Rights Law 50-a.
Thank you for your continued interest in fighting for equal justice,
Dan Quart
Publisher, New Yorkers for Justice
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