The New York state prison system is abusing “emergency” authority to gut solitary confinement reforms indefinitely, a new class action lawsuit alleges.

The lawsuit, filed by the Legal Aid Society on Thursday, asks a state court to overturn the prison agency’s plans to suspend the reforms, details of which attorneys only recently uncovered.

At issue is the Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement Act, known as HALT, which went into effect in 2022. The law set restrictions on which incarcerated people New York jails and prisons can send to solitary confinement, how long they can keep them there, and for what reason. It also raised standards for both traditional and new “rehabilitative” isolation units, guaranteeing prisoners a minimum number of daily out-of-cell hours for group programs and recreation.

President Donald Trump may have retreated from a full-blown trade war with most of the world, but his fight with China is still raging — and it could stymie New York City’s plans to decarbonize its public housing.

As of Monday afternoon, US tariffs on Chinese imports stood at 145 percent, with China charging 125 percent duties on US goods in response. That could throw a wrench in US climate efforts. China remains by far the world’s largest producer of green technologies and dominates the underlying supply chains. While the United States has already largely shut out some Chinese products, like solar panels, it still imports others, like grid-scale batteries. New York City is counting on one Chinese product in particular to help green its public housing: innovative window heat pump units made by the Guangdong-based company Midea.

Sometimes, innocent people go to jail because of junk science or an unreliable witness. More often than not, though, official misconduct is what leads to wrongful convictions, both across the country and in New York. A police officer may have coerced a false confession, or a prosecutor may have withheld important evidence at trial.

Theoretically, counties across New York have a vehicle to correct this kind of misconduct. Conviction integrity units, or CIUs, housed in district attorneys’ offices, are responsible for investigating incarcerated people’s wrongful conviction claims. Advocates and some CIU chiefs have promoted these programs as a way to address the sort of misconduct that contributes to these convictions in the first place. And the state’s District Attorneys Association has cited the units’ existence as a reason why New York doesn’t need an independent commission on prosecutorial misconduct.