When Deandre Donahue was arrested this winter after getting into a fight at an East Village bar and sent to Rikers Island, his family immediately put up their credit cards to bail him out. By law, he should have been released within three hours.
But the 27-year-old carpenter was held another 41 hours at the notorious jail. In that time, he said he witnessed four fights, saw a man beaten bloody for not wearing clothes in the shower and was packed like “sardines” in an area with no working toilets at the famously-dangerous Eric M. Taylor Center on Rikers Island, which holds new jail admissions.
“I felt like I had gone through a traumatic ordeal,” he said. “It felt like I had survived something that didn’t feel like a normal jail.”
This was not the first time someone has claimed they were held at Rikers longer than they were supposed to be after posting bail.
Last year, the Department of Correction agreed to pay up to $300 million in a class action settlement to end claims it violated the law by holding detainees for too long after their bail was paid.
The city agreed to pay claimants $3,500 apiece if officers failed to release them within three hours after bail was paid and has paid out nearly $152 million to claimants to date, according to the New York City Law Department.
The lawsuit says the delays were caused by staffing issues, the department using outdated technology like fax machines to notify officers that bail had been paid and correction officers waiting until they had a “critical mass” of people to release.
Donahue is not eligible to participate in the class action settlement because it only applies to people held beyond the three-hour mark between Oct. 4, 2014 and Oct. 21, 2022.
Still, his story is an example of how problems around release times remain at Rikers.
In 2022, the city jails department said it was bringing its “antiquated systems and processes” into the 21st century by launching a new unit responsible for tracking and evaluating…
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