Settlement Would Award $10 Million to Those Jailed Without Heat or Power

NEW YORK — People who endured a week without heat or electricity while incarcerated at a Brooklyn federal jail during a polar vortex in 2019 could share as much as $10 million in compensation under a proposed settlement deal.

The agreement lays out a detailed plan to pay varying amounts to people who have submitted claims, including $17,500 each to 69 people whose medical conditions went untreated during the crisis and $8,750 each to 945 others.

Many of the approximately 1,600 people held at the Metropolitan Detention Center, on the waterfront in Sunset Park, had described harrowing conditions during the outage, which followed a fire at the facility.

Detainees — including some who were awaiting trial — said they spent the week shivering in dark cells with toilets that wouldn’t flush, while access to food, medical care and phone calls were cut off.

As word spread following a report in The New York Times that week, protesters gathered outside the jail and elected officials demanded answers, but prison officials downplayed the situation.

Later that year, two men who had been inside, David Scott and Jeremy Cerda, filed a lawsuit on behalf of all of the affected detainees. The suit accused the warden at the time of “a shocking dereliction” of his duties to maintain the facility, which had been decaying for years. A subsequent report by the Justice Department’s inspector general strongly criticized how officials handled the crisis.

Now a proposed settlement to the lawsuit appears to be moving forward. Lawyers for the plaintiffs have sent a letter to the magistrate judge overseeing the case, Peggy Kuo, asking for an eight-month stay in the case while they try to implement an agreement with prosecutors in the office of the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District, Breon S. Peace.

Katherine R. Rosenfeld, a lawyer who worked on the case on behalf of the plaintiffs, said the outage was “catastrophic for the people who were in prison at the time.”

The agreement says that the lawyers will have to contact the claimants and get a critical mass of them to accept the terms. The U.S. attorney general, or his designee, and the judge in the case would also have to approve it.

“It’s an important development in terms of holding the federal government accountable for deplorable conditions that have been permitted to fester in federal prisons," Rosenfeld said of the deal.

A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment on the agreement Monday.

Rosenfeld worked on the case with professors and students from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law Civil Rights Clinic and colleagues from her firm, Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel.

She said her team had already filed claims on behalf of more than 1,500 detainees. She added that this type of deal, directing compensation to nearly everyone in a particular jail, was unusual in the federal prison system.

In contrast, New York has paid out large sums for class-action suits stemming from problems at city jails.

Last year, the city agreed to pay as much as $300 million to settle a case filed on behalf of people whose releases were delayed after they made bail.

In March, the city said it would pay up to $53 million to settle a suit from people who said they were wrongfully put in solitary confinement.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/22/nyregion/nyc-jail-settlement-blackout.html">The New York Times</a>.