A Judge Tossed a Prison Sex Abuse Lawsuit Over Typos. Hundreds More Dismissals Could Be Coming.

Hundreds more lawsuits alleging sexual assault by staff from New York’s Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, or DOCCS, may soon face the same fate as Moore’s. The state’s lawyers plan to ask judges to dismiss up to 500 prison sexual assault cases filed under the Adult Survivors Act, New York Focus and Hell Gate have learned.

The maneuver would be rooted in the strict filing requirements of the Court of Claims, which hears civil cases against the state. In other civil courts — like the state’s supreme courts, where hundreds of women have filed Adult Survivors Act suits against New York City over sexual abuse by Rikers Island jail staff — claimants can initiate cases by providing limited details. But in cases filed against New York state, judges have ruled that they need to share more information at the outset.

Lawmakers say they didn’t intend for filing requirements to stymie Adult Survivors Act claims. “I am very concerned by reports that hundreds of Adult Survivors Act cases alleging sexual abuse in state prisons may be subject to dismissal on mere technicalities,” said state Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal, the law’s lead sponsor.

Hoylman-Sigal introduced a bill earlier this year that would exempt cases filed under the act from the strict requirements. “For survivors of sexual abuse, recalling exact details of these traumatic moments can be difficult, particularly for those whose abuse occurred decades ago,” a memo accompanying the bill said. The bill passed the Senate but did not make it to the Assembly floor.

There is an “urgent need” to amend the Court of Claims law, said Konstantin Yelisavetskiy, a managing attorney at the law firm Slater Slater Schulman, which represents over 1,200 people alleging prison abuse under the Adult Survivors Act.

“Without this change, hundreds of abuse survivors risk being denied the day in court that the ASA was designed to guarantee them,” he said.

To date, New York Focus and Hell Gate have located two cases where the state has asked a court to dismiss prison Adult Survivors Act claims based on the strict filing criteria. In the first case, Moore’s, the judge agreed with an assistant attorney general’s argument that even typos in the original complaint can render a case dismissable — even while acknowledging that “absolute exactness is not required” for the state to be able to investigate the claims.

Moore’s lawsuit alleged that an officer shoved his finger in Moore’s anus during a violent strip search in which no contraband was found, then, six months later, beat him in the shower and inserted an object in his rectum. In video of the strip search, first reported by The New York Times, Moore can be heard screaming that officers are punching and sexually assaulting him. The footage shows blood on the walls and on Moore’s swollen face, and an officer discarding Moore’s bloodstained underwear.

Moore’s lawyers are appealing the decision. They argue that the 1930s law and court decisions that established the modern Court of Claims and its filing requirements were never meant to create such a roadblock.

The second dismissal motion, which state lawyers filed in a case brought by a formerly incarcerated woman, has yet to be decided. The woman alleges that throughout 1990 and 1991, two guards and a civilian employee at Groveland Correctional Facility orally and vaginally raped her hundreds of times. The claim includes the last names of one of the officers and the civilian employee, and doesn’t include the name of the second officer.

Assistant Attorney General Margaret Jones has argued that the court must dismiss the case because the woman’s claim did not offer discrete dates of when the hundreds of alleged assaults took place, because the physical descriptions of the men were “too vague,” and because DOCCS couldn’t locate records of the employees she named. In addition to last names, the claim described the prison employees’ roles, shift times, physical traits, and in one case, a description of a mole on the employee’s penis.

The two dismissal motions are the first of hundreds that the state plans to file. During an October 15 conference with court officials and lawyers involved in prison Adult Survivors Act cases, attorneys for DOCCS said that the state was planning to ask courts to throw out 500 cases based on the filing requirements, according to Yelisavetskiy and Anna Kull, a partner at the law firm Levy Konigsberg, which represents about 400 claimants in prison Adult Survivors Act cases.

Asked to confirm the planned dismissal motions, the state Office of the Attorney General said that “these matters are under review.”

“Cases brought under the Adult Survivors Act can be emotionally painful and difficult,” a spokesperson for Attorney General James said in a statement. “As the state’s attorney, our office has a legal responsibility to represent state agencies, and we work to fulfill that obligation while also supporting survivors’ rights. Every survivor of sexual assault deserves access to justice, and we are committed to ensuring that they are heard and respected.”

A DOCCS spokesperson said the agency does not comment on active litigation and had no comment on the typo dismissal.

When signing the bill, Governor Kathy Hochul hailed the Adult Survivors Act as “an important step in empowering survivors across New York.” She may not have realized that many of the resulting claims would be against the state itself: Over half of the 3,000 cases filed under the law ended up alleging sexual abuse by staff in the state’s prisons, with those claimants suing New York for over $30 billion in damages, according to a New York Focus and Hell Gate analysis. (Civil cases often settle for far less than the amount claimants originally sue for.)

Advocates have long decried rampant and underreported sexual abuse in New York prisons. A recent nationwide federal Department of Justice study found that two of the state’s women’s facilities have the highest and third highest reported rates of sexual victimization among the 177 prisons surveyed.

The Court of Claims law dictates that when filing a case, claimants must state the “time when,” “place where,” and “nature” of the wrong that took place. Courts have strictly interpreted that requirement. In a consequential decision earlier this year, the Court of Appeals, New York’s highest court, ordered the Court of Claims to dismiss a case filed under the Child Victims Act, a 2019 law that paused statutes of limitations in the same way the Adult Survivors Act did, but for child sexual abuse lawsuits. The claimant didn’t know the names of the state employees who allegedly abused him and could only offer a four-year window during which the alleged abuse occurred — a level of detail that would likely fly in other courts, but which the Court of Appeals ruled didn’t satisfy Court of Claims filing requirements. The case set the bar for how to apply the strict requirements to the thousands of old cases filed under the two laws.

“There are so many stumbling blocks for litigants, especially incarcerated individuals, that it makes it almost impossible for them to successfully bring claims in the Court of Claims,” said Cassandra Rohme, chair of the civil rights division at Liakas Law and one of Moore’s attorneys.