NYC hit with soaring number of lawsuits fueled by conviction reversals — and taxpayers could be on the hook
New York City got slapped with 10,359 lawsuits in the last fiscal year — an 18% increase from the previous 12 months and the most in at least a decade, records show.
Cases in state court rose by 17%, to 9,540 from 8,151, and by 24% in federal court, to 819 from 661, according to the city’s Mayor’s Management Report, released last month.
The thousands of combined suits filed during the fiscal year that ended June 30 were the most against the city since the annual management reports began documenting lawsuit tallies in fiscal 2010.
The soaring number of suits could put New York taxpayers on the hook for billions in settlements and judgments.
In fiscal 2023, the city shelled out a record $1.2 billion in settlements. The new Mayor’s Management Report cites fiscal 2024’s settlement payouts plummeting 24%, to an estimated $909,297,000, but notes that number is “not finalized.”
A hike in federal cases is largely attributable to many longtime former jailbirds filing multimillion-dollar lawsuits after having murder and other convictions reversed by review units at the Manhattan, Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn District Attorney offices, the city Law Department said.
They include pending suits filed in the past year by James Irons and Thomas Malik, who were teens when they allegedly confessed to disgraced former NYPD Detectives Louis Scarcella and Stephen Chmil that they fatally set subway clerk Harry Kaufman on fire in his token booth in 1995.
Co-defendant Vincent Ellerbe was also cleared of the charges by the Brooklyn DA’s office after spending decades in jail, but reached an undisclosed settlement with the city.
Others filing suits include Emel McDowell, who spent 19 years in jail for the 1990 murder of 19-year-old Jonathan Powell at a Brooklyn house party; and Ricardo Jimenez, who was freed from jail in 2022 after serving 16 years for gunning down Sean Worrell, 20, during a 1989 dispute over popcorn at a midnight screening of “Batman” at a Bronx movie theater.
Nearly 1,000 of the new lawsuits in state courts were filed under the Adult Survivors Act, which opened a legal window allowing sexual assault victims to bring civil cases after the statute of limitation has passed.
The city’s Gender Motivated Violence Act extended the statute of limitations in Big Apple sex abuse cases to March.
“Despite the high volume of matters, we are committed to fighting frivolous cases and resolving lawsuits when protracted litigation is not in the city’s interests,” said Nicholas Paolucci, a Law Department spokesman.
