(CN) — New York City police unions took to the state's high court Thursday to challenge a city law aimed at protecting people being arrested from airway-blocking restraints that can be fatal. The unions claim the statute is "unconstitutionally vague" and officers won't be able to tell if they are violating it.
The law, passed in July of 2020 by then-Mayor Bill de Blasio, makes it a criminal offense for police officers to make an arrest by “sitting, kneeling, or standing on the chest or back in a manner that compresses the diaphragm.”
Led by the city’s Police Benevolent Association, more than a dozen police unions sued the city saying the language is too vague because it doesn't clearly define what it means to “compress the diaphragm.”
“A police officer has not way of telling during an arrest, or after, whether or not he or she is doing anything ‘in a manner that compresses the diaphragm,’ or what if anything is happening internally with the diaphragm,” the police unions’ attorneys wrote in their brief.
In 2020, the police unions won summary judgment in Manhattan state court, but the First Department of the New York State Supreme Court’s appellate division reversed the ruling, finding the statute was sufficient when “measured by common understandings and practices.”
During Thursday’s arguments, the New York Court of Appeals judges seemed to disagree with the police unions’ understanding of the law.
“There’s a way to read it as outlawing certain manners of sitting, kneeling or standing that have the tendency to compress the diaphragm — regardless of whether they do it in a particular case or not,” Chief Judge Rowan D. Wilson said.
Attorney Steven Engel argued on behalf of the Police Benevolent Association. He said the statute’s wording doesn’t make sense because the diaphragm is not a “compressible muscle.”
“The diaphragm is a muscle that goes around the back of your spine,” Engel said. “If you said compressing the stomach, that makes sense. Compressing the chest makes sense. But that’s not what this law says.”
When the judges pressed him on whether it was in fact impossible to compress someone's diaphragm, Engel did not give a direct answer, but said it’s impossible for a police officer to know if they are doing so.
Richard Dearing, who represented New York City, argued the law's meaning, that an officer can't put pressure on the diaphragm of the person being arrested, is "simple."
“An officer can know when they’re applying bodyweight pressure in the vicinity of the diaphragm — to the external exterior of the body — and know they’re therefore in jeopardy of violating the statute,” Dearing said.
City and state legislators passed a flurry of criminal justice reforms aimed at holding police accountable and enforcing transparency and restraint in the summer of 2020, after George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer who knelt on him, sparking international protests.
De Blasio signed the rule into law on July 15, 2020, about a month after then-Governor Andrew Cuomo passed a state law banning the intentional use of "a chokehold or similar restraint."
Police unions have made similar appeals to block criminal justice reforms aimed at cracking down on police departments since 2020. In a separate lawsuit filed in federal court in that year, police unions attempted to block the release of thousands of NYPD disciplinary records, many of which were posted by ProPublica. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals then rejected the NYPD’s bid to block the publishing of these records in 2021.
Follow @NikaSchoonover
Subscribe to Closing Arguments
Sign up for new weekly newsletter Closing Arguments to get the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and hot cases and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world.
Additional Reads
-
-
Campaign finance laws July 3, 2024
-
Redistricting Mississippi July 3, 2024 -
