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Law360, New York (August 12, 2020, 4:55 PM EDT) -- Counsel for inmates at Brooklyn's Metropolitan Detention Center said Wednesday they are dropping their petition claiming prison officials deliberately ignored the dangers of the coronavirus outbreak, but said they still have concerns about the 1,500-person federal facility.
More than a month after U.S. District Judge Rachel P. Kovner denied their bid to have potentially hundreds of virus-vulnerable inmates set free, the legal team representing a proposed class of prisoners filed a notice of dismissal without prejudice to potential future claims.
Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel LLP partner Katherine Rosenfeld, who helped bring the case, told Law360 in an email that questions remain about how good a job the MDC is doing with respect to caring for inmates and protecting them from the deadly virus.
"Along with allies, we will stay vigilant to monitor the situation," she said.
In June, when Judge Kovner declined their bid for a mass release, only one of the six inmates who joined the petition by name, Elodia Lopez, was still at the facility. Petitioner Hassan Chunn, for example, had been released on April 8, according to prison records. Since then, records show Lopez has also been released.
The March petition asserted that the indifference of warden Derek Edge and other prison personnel exposed the petitioners and hundreds of other inmates to "stark and alarming" risk from the virus.
But in June, Judge Kovner held that, while there were "deficiencies" in the MDC's approach, those failures were not the product of "deliberate indifference."
Nevertheless, Rosenfeld said Wednesday, she and other counsel have ongoing concerns about "dangerous indifference" by the Bureau of Prisons.
"While the pressure of the case resulted in increased transparency and some changes by the BOP, including increased testing, we remain concerned about the health of those people inside the prison despite the release of the named plaintiffs," she said.
The Brooklyn U.S. Attorney's Office, which represents the MDC, and the BOP declined comment.
The petitioners are represented by Katherine Rosenfeld, Andrew Wilson, Samuel Shapiro and Scout Katovich of Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel LLP, Betsy Ginsberg and Alexander Reinert of the Cardozo Civil Rights Clinic, and Jane Shvets of Debevoise & Plimpton LLP.
The government is represented by James Cho, Seth Eichenholtz, Joseph Marutollo and Paulina Stamatelos of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York.
The case is Chunn et al. v. Edge, case number 1:20-cv-01590, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.
--Editing by Amy Rowe.
For a reprint of this article, please contact reprints@law360.com.
