Council members want answers about last month’s courtroom birth

More than half of the members in the New York City Council sent a letter to Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, the city’s district attorneys and administrative judges Thursday urging the city to investigate why a handcuffed woman was forced to give birth in a Brooklyn courtroom last month.  

The letter, organized by the council’s progressive and women’s caucuses, comes several weeks after a 33-year-old woman named Samantha Randazzo went into labor during her May 15 arraignment at Brooklyn Criminal Court. At nine months pregnant, she was handcuffed behind her back as she waited to be arraigned for low-level drug and trespassing charges. While NYPD officials say the handcuffs were removed while Randazzo was in active labor, her baby was delivered by a court officer without any medical equipment, and she was reportedly in full view of multiple court staff. . Mere hours earlier, she was discharged from Coney Island Hospital despite being in police custody and heavily pregnant. Randazzo ultimately delivered a healthy baby a little before midnight.

“This horrific and degrading incident is the result of a series of systemic failures that reinforced conditions which put the people of New York needlessly in harm's way,” the letter, which was shared exclusively with City & State, reads. “We’re calling for an internal investigation into the circumstances that kept a nine-month pregnant mother in police custody for over 30 hours for an offense in which police and the district attorney have discretion to issue an appearance ticket.”

The incident stirred a wave of outrage last month as public defenders and legal advocates blamed city and state agencies for what they charged were a multitude of systemic failures. At least three people have died from medical issues in custody while waiting to be arraigned over the past year. Two died in Brooklyn holding cells over the past two months alone.

Sam Raskin, a spokesperson for the mayor, said that the Mamdani administration is reviewing the factors that led to the courtroom birth incident and discussing how to potentially respond, including “reviewing the policies and protocols practiced by the NYPD, NYC Health + Hospitals, the courts, and other relevant entities.”

"What Samantha Randazzo went through was horrifying and completely unacceptable. No one should be forced to give birth in a courtroom, and the fact that this happened demands serious scrutiny,” Raskin said. “We must understand how these failures occurred and what potential changes are necessary to prevent something like this from occurring again."

Twenty nine council members signed onto the letter. Speaker Julie Menin is not one of them, but several members of her leadership team are: Majority Leader Shaun Abreu, Majority Whip Kamillah Hanks and Deputy Majority Whip Elsie Encarnacion. 

In addition to calling for an investigation, the letter urged the city to station EMS workers in courthouses, to ensure the Civilian Complaint Review Board automatically begins investigating any deaths that occur in custody and more broadly, to “stop the surge of quality-of-life policing and the practice of custodial arrests and detainment for low-level charges.” It also calls on the city’s district attorneys to more infrequently prosecute low-level violations or to issue desk appearance tickets. 

While the state currently has a series of laws that ban the shackling of incarcerated pregnant people while they are in labor, they don’t apply to local police authorities. An incident in 2018 in which a handcuffed woman went into labor in a Bronx holding cell spurred the NYPD to update its rules on restraining pregnant people, though they have continued to generate backlash. A package of legislation up for consideration in the state Legislature is aimed at further improving the treatment of pregnant people while they are incarcerated. One such measure would ban handcuffing people in labor who are detained by police.