East End towns and villages have settled a lawsuit brought last month by the Suffolk County Legal Aid Society over the towns’ justice court facilities.
The Legal Aid Society, complaining about court facilities in the towns of Riverhead, Southold and Southampton and the villages of Southampton and Sag Harbor, had asked a State Supreme Court judge to order to those towns and villages to conduct criminal arraignments in Suffolk County District Court. Existing facilities don’t provide confidential meeting space for attorneys to confer with defendants in custody, compelling defendants to converse with their lawyers in the presence of law enforcement personnel. That arrangement violates the criminal defendant’s constitutional rights, the suit alleges.
Under a settlement that’s already been signed and was filed yesterday in state court, the towns of Riverhead and Southold have agreed to undertake some construction work, according to Legal Aid Society attorney Sabato Caponi, who filed the action Feb. 4.
Riverhead has agreed to build a partition in a small conference room adjacent to the courtroom so that prisoners can be secured in separate area, protecting the safety of attorneys, Caponi said.
Southold is also creating an attorney-client conference space in an existing room. The town has to knock through a wall to make a door so it’s accesible from the exterior, Caponi said, and also build a partition to make it safer.
Riverhead and Southold are the only two municipalities that have to do any construction under the terms of the settlement, which calls for all work to be completed by April 30, he said.
The Riverhead Town Board authorized the supervisor to sign the stipulation of settlement at last week’s regular town board meeting.
Riverhead Supervisor Sean Walter said up front he agreed “100 percent” with the Legal Aid Society’s claims, but said the remedy sought — moving arraignments to county district court — was not realistic.
He said he had a windowed door installed to create a private conference area for attorney-client conversations, but security concerns were voiced by law enforcement officers who, though they could watch the prisoner, might not be able to access him or her if violence erupted. The room has boxes and file cabinets in it, also, which the officers said posed an additional security issue.
Myriad problems with justice court facility remain unsolved
Riverhead has been considering various means by which to improve its justice court facilities, which town leaders all agree are inadequate.
Walter has supported moving the justice court out of the building at 210 Howell Avenue it shares with the police department— a facility, built in the late 1980s, which town-hired consultants concluded is “grossly inadequate in terms of space, security and parking.”
Councilman James Wooten, an ex-cop who served as a court officer in the town courtroom, said in an interview last March the town has “known for two decades that the current facility is woefully inadequate.”
In 2003, the town board hired engineering consultants H2M to develop a plan for the police and court complex, but when that plan came with an $8.7 million price tag, it was not implemented.
A security assessment completed in 2006 by the N.Y. Unified Court System’s public safety department documents the building’s shortcomings as far as the justice court is concerned.
The town lobbied for and got the state to transfer its shuttered armory building on Route 58 to the town for renovation as a new police and court complex. The state transferred the armory site to Riverhead in 2011. In 2013, the town board awarded an $87,500 contract to architects Ehasz Giacalone and engineers Cashin Associates to prepare an assessment and reuse plan for the armory. When the cost of the renovation came in at an estimated $11 million to $13 million, the town board balked again. Only Walter and Wooten voiced support for going forward.
Councilman John Dunleavy said last March he wanted to postpone any decision until the town has a clearer understanding of its financial position and when it will be able to sell land at the Calverton Enterprise Park.
Councilwoman Jodi Giglio said last March she wanted the town to assess all town-owned buildings, not just the armory. Town Hall and the police/court building both need new roofs and infrastructure upgrades, which will need to be done whether or not the town renovates the armory, she said. The councilwoman advocated moving town offices into the Second Street firehouse, which the town then owned, moving the justice court into the current town hall and having the police take over the entire building at 210 Howell Avenue. She said she preferred to see the armory used as a recreational facility rather than a police-court complex. (The town board in July voted 4-1, with Giglio dissenting, to sell the old firehouse to builder Bob Castaldi.)
Councilman George Gabrielsen said he couldn’t support the multimillion construction project, which town justices Richard Ehlers and Allen Smith suggested the board finance by issuing bonds. They argued that the debt service for the police-court complex would come due as landfill closing debt is retired, so there would be no net increase in the town’s debt load.
“We’re in a $4 million hole. If we knock some debt down and ring up new debt, we’re still in that hole. We can’t just replace it,” Gabrielsen said.
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