Felisa Geddis got her first look at Dondre Richardson as police officers led him, handcuffed, from the 88th precinct house in Brooklyn on a Wednesday night in January 2020. Her 55-year-old cousin, L. Antonio Litman, had been stabbed to death nine days earlier, and the officers had arrested Richardson for the crime.
She remembered her relief that a suspect had been caught. “It seemed like the case was so cut and dry,” Geddis told THE CITY.
Five years later, the case has still not gone to trial, leaving the victim’s family in a terrible purgatory.
Geddis, who was raised with Litman and considered him a sibling, said she has attended scores of hearings, even after she was diagnosed and treated for cancer. She compared the cycle of hope and disappointment to the whiplash of bungee-jumping: “It’s like someone is stepping on your heart over and over again.”
The first case of COVID-19 had not yet been diagnosed in the city on the day Richardson began his jail stay on Rikers Island. In the years since he pleaded not guilty, he has been awakened before dawn and bused to the courthouse more than 70 times, according to court records, mostly to make momentary appearances followed by postponements of weeks or months.
“The longer you be in here, the longer people going to fade,” he said in a recent interview from behind bars. “When I first came here, everybody was talking to me, everybody on the phone, everybody coming to visit. Nothing anymore. As far as people are concerned, I’m probably dead.”
Metal gates lock in detainees at the Otis Bantum Correctional Center on Rikers Island, March 20, 2025. Credit: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
The case has dragged on unusually long. It hasn’t helped that about two years in, Richardson grew frustrated with his court-appointed attorney and began representing himself. His trial is finally scheduled to begin in May.
But in New York’s justice system, interminable waits are common. Over 1,400 people jailed on Rikers Island have been there more than a year, and over 500 have been there more than two, according to records obtained from the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice in November. The vast majority have been charged with but not convicted of violent crimes, each connected to victims with their own constellations of kin and community, all awaiting closure.
Their only way out is through the city’s courts, which have long been plagued with delays. The system fell further behind during the coronavirus pandemic and has yet to regain even its former, languorous speed.
There are other chokepoints, too — psychiatric centers that are too overcrowded to admit detainees found mentally unfit to stand trial, and inmates ready to begin their sentences upstate whose transfers have been delayed in the wake of a wildcat strike by correctional officers earlier this year — but the courts themselves are a central cog in the process.
And the longer the courts take to resolve cases, the slower the jail empties, and the higher its population rises.
The courts are tweaking their procedures to hurry cases up, but even small changes risk disrupting the delicate balance between prosecutors and defense attorneys. Tina Luongo, the chief attorney of the Legal Aid Society’s criminal defense practice, said public defenders instinctively resist efforts to accelerate cases. “When you talk about court efficiency, that is at the peril of the accused,” she said.
But delays also make Rikers Island more dangerous. More than a decade ago, after a class-action lawsuit accused corrections officers of engaging in a pattern of excessive force against inmates, the Department of Correction accepted an independent monitor to oversee reforms. The monitor’s reports have documented further deterioration of conditions, noting years-long jail stays as a contributing factor.
One report, released in 2023, calculated that detainees on Rikers Island languish four times longer than the national average, fueling high rates of violence inside, as those held longest lose hope. Since 2019 the average length of stay has climbed 34%.
A ballooning jail population also impedes plans to close Rikers Island and move detainees to borough-based facilities. This month the jail hit a five-year-high of 7,200, whereas the planned replacements, under a scheme introduced in 2017, can hold a maximum of 4,160.
The Wait Begins
On a December morning in a windowless courtroom of the Kings County Supreme Court, a fresh group of the accused began their wending journey. Judge Deepa Ambekar was arraigning a few dozen people arrested in Brooklyn, a fraction of some 12,000 felony cases that will land in New York City courts this year.
The alleged crimes — assaults, robberies, an occasional murder — were as serious as the proceedings were tedious. Most felonies inch along for more than a year before resolution.
Comptroller Brad Lander’s office has calculated that speeding up cases by even a few weeks could shrink the jail population by over 1,200 people. But all parties have something to gain by slowing proceedings.
Prosecutors, who want to build the best case but don’t have capacity to bring every defendant to trial, can gain leverage in plea negotiations by jailing defendants at length. Defense lawyers, reluctant to risk their clients’ liberty at trial, may benefit from delays as witnesses’ memories fade. Even defendants who anticipate years of imprisonment upstate sometimes prefer to stick it out on Rikers Island, where family can visit by city bus and time served counts toward their sentences. A single scheduling conflict can set everything back a month or more.
State law requires prosecutors be ready to try felonies within six months of arraignment, but in practice, this “speedy trial” rule has little bite. Many delays stop the clock and judges have limited enforcement power. Homicides are exempt.
That’s how, five years after a terrible crime, Geddis and Richardson can still be in limbo.
At the courthouse, the clerk who retrieved Richardson’s file for inspection delivered the two-foot-thick stack of paper in a heavy box. Handwritten notes indicate it took prosecutors three years to certify they had turned over all the evidence to the defense. The case outlasted its original judge, who retired in 2024.
Geddis believes Richardson is bringing frivolous motions to prolong the proceedings. But the case had been passed between at least three prosecutors, and she also expressed frustration with the courts. “Imagine how much money the city has gone through,” she said, listing off the attorneys and staff whose time each hearing consumes. “I just think that this judge should have said, ‘Enough is enough.’”
Richardson lays the blame on the criminal justice system, too, and says he’s impatient for trial.
“They take their time and drag their feet with everything they do,” he said, describing how corrections officers would wake him at 5 a.m. for the long trip to court, only to see his case further delayed. “Come back in two months, and then it’s an adjournment because the cop ain’t there.”
His case is a part of a broader pattern. New York City’s courts are among the slowest in the country, according to a 2020 study conducted by the National Center for State Courts across 21 states.
The center says courts should aim to resolve 90% of felonies within six months. New York City’s courts do not resolve even half in that timeline, according to data from the Office of Court Administration.
In more efficient court systems, judges take a firmer hand, setting and enforcing deadlines and “measuring, monitoring, and intervening to move things along,” according to one of the study’s authors, Richard Schauffler.
When New York City’s courts closed for more than a year because of the pandemic, a backlog of thousands of cases built up. The courts still have not recovered: Last year, they conducted about 50% fewer jury trials for felony cases than in 2019, even as the number of pending felony cases delayed beyond the court’s standard of 180 days rose more than 55%, according to court data.
The city’s district attorneys blame reforms to the state’s discovery laws that were also enacted during this period. By setting stricter timelines for exchanging evidence, a process known as “discovery,” the changes should theoretically accelerate cases.
But prosecutors and police say they have struggled to meet the new requirements, prompting defense attorneys to file motions challenging whether discovery is complete, prolonging cases further.
The role of discovery has become a hot-button issue in Albany, with Gov. Kathy Hochul proposing lawmakers narrow some of the reforms as a part of this year’s budget. The budget legislation could pass as early as next week.
But discovery was a driver of delay long before the reforms, according to Michael Rempel, director of the Data Collaborative for Justice at John Jay College. He contended that if prosecutors and police abide by their new obligations, it will likely accelerate cases, not hold them back. “The reform’s impact depends heavily on the quality of its implementation,” he said.
Oren Yaniv, a spokesperson for the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office, said more resources wouldn’t be enough to speed things up. “Discovery created this whole new avenue of litigation that is occupying the courts for months, and it’s over stuff that is not actually gonna appear at trial,” he said. “Money won’t fix it.”
Is It Different This Time?
Delays have been a feature of New York City’s courts for as long as anyone can remember. In the 1970s, the courts tried sanctioning attorneys who ask for unreasonable adjournments. In the 1980s, they shifted personnel to overburdened portions of the courts. In the 1990s, a new chief administrative judge, Jonathan Lippman, deployed specialized teams of judges to clear backlogged cases, what some called a “rocket docket.”
Lippman, who later served as chief judge of New York State and then headed the commission tasked with developing a plan to close the Rikers Island jail complex, said the problem with those efforts was that they blunted delays by robbing other parts of the court of personnel without solving their underlying causes. “A resourceful administrator can speed up the processing on a short-term basis,” he said, but “the problem is institutionalizing it.”
Retired Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman speaks at a City Hall close-Rikers rally with Mayor Bill de Blasio and Council Speaker Speaker Corey Johnson, Feb. 14, 2018. Credit: John McCarten/New York City Council
In October, as part of the courts’ latest attempts at reform, the chief administrative judge, Joseph Zayas, announced a handful of new protocols meant to coax defense attorneys and prosecutors into promptly reviewing evidence and avoiding protracted negotiations. There are changes in courtroom procedure, additional court lawyers to help resolve issues in between formal hearings, and a shared citywide calendar to sync busy attorneys’ schedules.
Brooklyn began introducing the changes for jailed defendants last fall and they will roll out citywide this year.
Viewed in isolation, each reform might not seem groundbreaking, said Eric Washer, chief of staff to Zayas, but together they amount to a departure from the culture of delay. He declined to specify a measurable goal they hoped to achieve, but said they were a step in the right direction.
“Nobody can really say with a straight face that they’re doing the best they can do,” he said. “We’re really putting ourselves out there and trying to do better, and we’re hoping others will come along.”
Whether cases move faster will depend on how prosecutors and defense lawyers respond.
Matt Kluger, a criminal defense attorney, has seen reforms come and go for 30 years, to little effect. “On paper, these things look great,” he said, “but if the deadlines aren’t enforced there, they have no meaning.”
The Legal Aid Society is short-staffed for serious felony cases, according to Luongo. The organization shed three times as many experienced lawyers in 2023 as it did in 2021, she said. Prosecutors report similar attrition, although it has slowed since the pandemic.
In the Brooklyn courtroom that adopted the new protocols in December, the changes were subtle. Handouts stacked on the counsel table outlined timelines meant to kickstart production of the most important discovery materials, and meetings to resolve disagreements about anything missing.
But plenty of inefficiencies remain. A few jailed defendants who had spent all morning in transit from Rikers Island to Jay Street were still waiting to appear. Court officers stop bringing them up to the fourth-floor courtroom well before the 1 p.m. lunchbreak, one defense lawyer explained.
Lippman said success would hinge on everybody playing their part.
“This is an ensemble cast, and it’s not a question of finger-pointing,” he said. “It’s a question of working together to get this done.”
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