New York’s criminal justice system has failed crime victims yet again — and its attorneys bear the lion’s share of the blame.
Why aren’t the city’s prosecutors asking for mental competence exams — known internally as a Section 730.30 — more regularly at arraignments involving the mentally disturbed? Why aren’t public defenders requesting them on behalf of their mentally ill clients?
Ramon Rivera, the offender who allegedly went on a Manhattan stabbing spree Monday and killed three innocents, had a long recidivist history.
In all those many encounters, assistant district attorneys, Legal Aid lawyers and judges had to notice he wasn’t playing with a full deck.
As a bail agent who works in the criminal justice system every single day, I can say with authority it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see when a person being prosecuted is suffering from extreme mental illness.
The 730.30 process has been the law forever — but the City of New York isn’t deploying it as a strategy to protect the public from the homeless mentally ill.
It is an effective tool that could prevent a lot of unnecessary suffering.
Under New York state law, a criminal court “must issue an order of examination when it is of the opinion that the defendant may be [a psychologically] incapacitated person.”
Why isn’t this practice a matter of course in NYC?
I’ve sat in on countless thousands of arraignments in my career, and I can tell you the 730.30 statute is tragically under-utilized.
Maybe it just comes down to cost: Psychological evaluations cost tons of money, and keeping the dangerous mentally ill in psychiatric hospitals does, too.
Obviously it’s easier for the city and state to simply release them back to the streets.
But you can’t claim to be a social justice warrior and leave the indigent and the mentally ill to fend for themselves.
Rivera is a sick man who should have been held for a psych exam and hospitalized to protect the safety of the city’s residents — and to protect him from himself.
If an offender had a diabetic seizure in court, 911 would be called immediately and the offender transported for medical help.
And while mental illness can often be invisible to the human eye, it wasn’t in the case of Ramon Rivera. Anyone could have seen that in a New York minute.
Releasing the mentally ill without proper intervention is tantamount to negligence.
Where is the consideration for the public? One glance at Rivera’s rap sheet and it’s easy to see he’s a menace to society.
Why didn’t any of the key players in his adjudication process care about him enough to get him the help he so desperately needed? Why didn’t any of them care about the crime victims he could potentially hurt?
Gov. Kathy Hochul has made it abundantly clear that the state expects judges to hold offenders who pose a threat to society.
In 2023, in her last revision to the bail reform law, she removed language instructing judges to release defendants using “the least restrictive means.”
With that change, she wisely gave power and authority back to judges in rendering custody decisions — power that was taken away from them in Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s 2020 bail reform debacle.
She saw the need to give broad jurisdiction in these matters back to the bench.
So don’t go blaming this triple murder on the governor — this is a Legal Aid problem, first and foremost.
The attorney who represented this poor man didn’t do him any justice by not demanding his incredible and emergent need for the 730.30. Maybe if he or she had done so, those three victims might be alive today.
The Legal Aid Society is a massive, well-funded bureaucracy that is hardly understaffed.
Why aren’t its attorneys begging the court for 730.30 intervention in every possible instance? Why aren’t they fighting for the well-being of all of us — including for their mentally ill clients in desperate need of care?
Meanwhile, prosecutors and judges had the ability to hold this perp and do the world a favor by getting him to a psych hospital.
Instead he was sent back to the streets where he came from to wreak havoc on unknowing New Yorkers.
Shame on them all.
New York City needs to get it together.
We have an enormous number of homeless individuals, and the majority of them suffer mental illness. The 730.30 is a tool in the toolbox that must be used.
These senseless murders did not have to happen, and they wouldn’t have happened — if only Rivera’s Legal Aid attorney, or any other authority he encountered, had sounded the alarm.
Michelle Esquenazi is president of the National Association of Bail Agents and of the New York State Bail Association.
