What killed Daniel Prude? The 41-year-old died in March 2020 after cops pinned him down during a drug-induced mental health crisis. For three minutes, Rochester police officers pressed Prude’s head and torso into the street, continuing their hold for nearly a minute after he began vomiting. It was one of the highest-profile deaths in police custody in a year that saw a historic nationwide movement against police brutality.

According to a state investigation, an autopsy, and the cops who held him to the ground, Prude was killed by something called “excited delirium.” The condition is said to turn people into erratic aggressors and can supposedly lead to cardiac arrest.

Authorities cited excited delirium in other notorious Black Lives Matter-era deaths in police custody, including those of George Floyd, Elijah McClain, and Angelo Quinto. The purported diagnosis had become so popular among first responders that, in Rochester, paramedics speculated even before they saw him that Prude was likely experiencing the condition, according to the state investigation.

Yet in the last four years, a vast swath of the U.S. medical establishment has rejected excited delirium as a diagnosis. Six leading national medical associations have fully disavowed it, while another two have distanced themselves from it. Floyd’s home state of Minnesota, McClain’s Colorado, and Quinto’s California have barred public officials from citing the syndrome.

Medical experts say excited delirium is a theory, not a recognized disease with a specific physiological cause. And they have argued it can obscure the actual causes of deaths, especially when police are involved.

Now, a training document obtained through a public records request by New York Focus and The Intercept sheds new light on how the disavowed diagnosis infiltrated the Rochester Police Department before Prude’s death.

As Governor Kathy Hochul and state lawmakers prepare to head into budget season next month, they have a slate of new child poverty policies to consider.

The Child Poverty Reduction Advisory Council just issued recommendations to cut the state’s child poverty rate in half, as Hochul committed to do in 2021 when she signed legislation creating the council.

The council voted Wednesday to endorse a $9 billion package of proposals that it estimates would provide financial support to more than 1.5 million families. The most impactful proposal, to expand and increase the state child tax credit, would alone reduce child poverty by 23 percent, they said.

New York City’s sluggish response times stem from a stagnant Law Department budget that has overburdened its staff attorneys. Worker-side lawyers say that the agency’s staff often effectively work as both attorneys and paralegals on cases. They lack relevant information before hearings, causing them to request extensions or make mistakes.

The agency often misses the deadline to approve or reject an application. When it does approve a case, it’s then often late to pay back the lost wages.

“At times they don’t send my check and I have to inform my attorneys,” an ACS worker testified to the state Senate. “I was employed by the city of New York since 1985 and I have never experienced such indignation.”

In the 1970s and ’80s, prompted by a nationwide fear over drugs and rising violence, states and the federal government enacted a slate of policies that sent more people to prison for longer, causing the national prison population to balloon.

In 1973, New York enacted one of the nation’s harshest sentencing regimes. Known as the Rockefeller Drug Laws, they included 15-to-life minimum sentences for selling drugs, including cannabis. The federal government later offered states billions of dollars to construct prisons if they had similar laws on the books; New York received over $216 million.

The national prison population started a slow decline after hitting its peak in the late 2000s. In New York, prison decarceration has been more rapid.