Council passes bill to require DOC to report detainee deaths
/
A bill by City Councilmember Carlina Rivera was passed by the legislative body on Monday, and would require the Department of Correction to make a number of changes to its policies regarding detainee deaths. File photo by Gerardo Romo / NYC Council Media Unit
By Jacob Kaye
The City Council on Monday passed a bill that they say will bring transparency to the way the city’s Department of Correction announces and shares information about detainee deaths.
The bill, which was sponsored by the former chair of the Council’s Criminal Justice Committee, Carlina Rivera, would require the DOC to make a number of changes to its notification policies regarding the deaths of detainees in its care.
The first draft of the legislation began to percolate several years ago, when former DOC Commissioner Louis Molina reversed the agency’s policy to notify the media after a detainee had died. The reversal came after one of the deadliest years on Rikers Island in recent history and as Molina made a number of changes to the agency resulting in a less transparent DOC.
Rivera said on Monday that the legislation will “require real oversight, transparency and accountability when someone dies in the custody of the Department of Correction.”
“A jail sentence should never be a death sentence, and our city agencies must be held accountable when someone is harmed in their care,” Rivera said. “The law will put clear rules in place. Families must be notified quickly. The public must be told when someone dies in custody. Independent investigations must happen.”
“The Department of Correction can't refuse to be held accountable when someone dies in their custody,” she added. “When there is no transparency, there is no trust.”
Beyond the DOC, the bill makes changes to the way oversight bodies investigate deaths on Rikers Island, where 41 people have died since Mayor Eric Adams took office and where over 100 people have died in the past decade.
Under the legislation, the Board of Correction, the watchdog panel for the DOC, would be required to investigate most deaths in custody and complete their investigation within 180 days. The BOC would also be required to produce a public report with findings and recommendations to prevent similar deaths, much like the reports they currently prepare following a detainee’s death. The DOC and Correctional Health Services, which runs healthcare in the city’s lock ups, would be required to respond to the BOC’s recommendations within 30 days.
The bill also would require the DOC to notify the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner and the BOC within three hours of learning about a death in custody. It would also require the agency to notify the detainee’s next of kin and their attorney within 24 to 48 hours, documenting each attempt at contact.
Beyond a detainee’s family and legal representative, the DOC would be required to announce the death publicly on the agency’s website within 24 hours after they contacted a next of kin. They’d have to include the detainee’s name, age, race, gender and the facility in which they died in the announcement. The DOC would also have to post instructions for how families could retrieve the person’s personal belongings.
The bill would also make a significant alternation to the way deaths are investigated if the detainee is granted compassionate release by a judge just before their demise.
Several times in recent years, terminally ill or injured detainees have been released by a judge not long before their death. While some of the detainees’ lawyers or family members claimed the reason for the detainee’s death was related to something that happened on Rikers, because they were released, the DOC and oversight bodies are not required to investigate.
The legislation clarifies that the compassionate release section of the law should not “be construed to limit the board’s discretion to investigate a death of an incarcerated individual held or confined under the jurisdiction of the department, including any death the board attributes to a person’s time in the custody of the department.”
All together, the legislation aims to address the attempt by Molina in 2023 to halt in-custody death notifications to the media.
The practice of announcing the deaths, which was first put in place under Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration, was reversed without warning and with little explanation.
“This legislation is a direct response to that announcement,” Rivera said on Monday.
“At this point, we really must be diligent in defining the protocols the DOC must follow when notifying the person in custody, especially their family, of course.”
Eight people have died in DOC custody this year, a sharp increase from last year, when five people died. Nine people died in 2023 and 19 died in 2022, the highest death toll in a decade.
Of the eight people who have died in 2025, three have died within the past three weeks.
Most recently, Christian Collado, a 51-year-old, died at Bellevue Hospital on Tuesday as he suffered from stage four cancer.
Collado’s attorney, Judah Maltz, told the Eagle that he had been fighting to get his client released in the lead up to his death.
“He couldn’t sit through a trial,” Maltz said last week. “Is he going to come into the courtroom on a hospital bed or a wheelchair and wear a mask on his face?”
“It would have been horrible,” he added.
Collado’s death was announced by the DOC.
Also announced by the DOC were the deaths of James Maldonado and Benjamin Kelly, who died a little more than an hour apart from each other.
Kelly was allegedly spotted by a correctional officer on Rikers Island having a medical episode around 3 p.m. on June 20. Though he was given medical aid, Kelly was pronounced dead around a half an hour later, according to the DOC.
Not long after, the DOC said Maldonado experienced a medical emergency while on a correction department bus heading to Rikers Island. He died around 20 minutes later.
The spike in detainee deaths comes as a federal judge has begun to map out a takeover of Rikers Island. Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York Laura Swain will soon receive recommendations and applications from those hoping to serve as the “remedial manager” at Rikers, otherwise known as a receiver.
The receiver will generally be tasked with tamping down violent conditions in the jails, which Swain said the city had failed to do over the 10 years it's been operating under court orders stemming from a case known as Nunez v. the City of New York.
The receiver will answer only to the judge and, in a number of instances, supplant the power of the DOC commissioner and the mayor of New York City. They will be able to make changes to DOC policies, procedures, protocols and systems related to the Nunez court orders; review, investigate and discipline officers who violate use of force rules; hire, promote and deploy staff throughout the jails; renegotiate contracts the city has with the correctional officers’ union, which has long opposed receivership; and ask Swain to “waive any legal or contractual requirements that impede [the receiver] from carrying out their duties.”
The remedial manager, whose powers will remain until the judge finds the city is in compliance with the court orders, will also be allowed to direct the DOC commissioner and any other DOC executive in regards to the Nunez orders.
Swain is expected to receive the names of all candidates for the role by the end of August.
