On the afternoon of September 17th, ahead of her trip to take pictures for a class assignment at New York City’s largest jail complex, a Lang journalism student received a prophetic text message from a friend. “Be careful girl,” read the text, a message she shrugged off at the time.
The student, who insisted on remaining anonymous for the sake of confidentiality, only provided her first name, Amanda. She was assigned to visit Rikers Island for her News, Narrative, and Design III class. Her professor asked all members of the class to go to Rikers and bring back photographs, video and or audio.
In what lawyers say was a blatantly unlawful detention and part of a larger trend of harassment towards photojournalists outside of federal buildings, Amanda had her homework assignment interrupted when she was taken into custody shortly after 4:30 pm on September 17th. According to Amanda, guards kept her for 30 to 45 minutes, rummaging through her belongings, deleting her photos, and even looking through her cell phone and diary.
“Besides me being extremely emotional, I was scared and felt violated with how thoroughly they searched everything,” Amanda said. “It was an intense experience.”
Her ordeal comes at a time when police officers around the country are constantly being exposed for their ignorance of First Amendment rights, as well as their unlawful conduct towards photographers, proving that this is no isolated incident.
Though correctional officers told Amanda she had no right to be taking pictures outside the jail, legal experts say the detention was illegal and that other rights were violated as well.
“I’ve never heard of a general law that you can’t take pictures of a jail,” Adam Goldstein, an attorney at the Student Press Law Center, the country’s only legal assistance agency dedicated to helping high school and college journalists. Goldstein said guards can ask visitors to leave if at any point they break jail rules, but pointed out that Amanda was outside, never entering the premises. The only law about taking pictures of Rikers pertains to being inside.
Jail officials, who didn’t know the details about the incident, acknowledged that people have the right to photograph outside of Rikers, but insisted that Amanda must have instigated the encounter.
“Taking pictures outside of the jail shouldn’t be illegal,” Peggie Cruz, Department of Corrections spokeswoman, said. “But something had to happen for the officers to be provoked.”
In attempts to verify Amanda’s story, NSFP put in several calls to the various branches of Rikers Island to see if the facility keeps public logs of detention. Officials responded, however, that since no official arrest was made, there wouldn’t be any record. (Amanda confirmed that the officers never wrote anything down.) All details are solely the accounts of the student involved.
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After several train transfers and a long drive on the Q100 bus, Amanda arrived at the island off the north coast of Queens that Thursday afternoon at around 4:30pm. She spent the bus ride overhearing parents telling half-truths to children about why they were traveling and others crying over cellphones. Even before she stepped foot on Rikers soil, she felt uncomfortable – like an outsider invading the fragile space of vulnerable family members.
When she got off the bus on the south side of the island, she walked towards the Eric M. Taylor Center. She immediately got to work on her assignment, snapping photos of some of the first things she saw.
“In the parking lot, I took pictures of the police do-not-cross signs. I took pictures of the barbed wire. Then I circled around the lot, where there was a police truck and took a picture of that,” Amanda said.
A correctional officer, who she said had been watching her, confronted her while she was taking a picture of the truck. At first, Amanda thought a conversation with an officer would be good material for class, but she soon realized there was more in store. The officer lead her inside to “see the commander,” who was in plainclothes, wearing a blouse and skirt, and standing with three other officers in uniform.
The commander, who Amanda claims never read her her rights, ordered her to unpack her bag. At first, Amanda was confused, but then when they asked to see her phone, she began to worry she had broken the law.
“I started emptying my bag like the commander asked,” Amanda said. “[Then] she asked me if I had a phone. That’s when I began to think maybe I did something wrong.”
According to Amanda, the officers peppered her with “who-sent-you’s,” to which she continuously explained her class and the assignment she was trying to complete.
“I told them a bunch of times that it was just homework,” Amanda said. “I was willing to show them emails or anything to prove it, [but] they kept wanting to know who sent me.”
Then, they threatened her.
“‘Well, maybe we’ll send you back in handcuffs so your teacher knows how much trouble you can get in,’” Amanda recalled one of the guards saying.
The situation continued to escalate. As many as seven officers joined in questioning her, she said, many of whom aggressively taunted her. She also said they forced her to unlock her phone, read her texts, and deleted pictures from both her cell and camera.
The officers even read her personal journal, Amanda said. When the commander saw her entries in Spanish, a Latin officer was called over to scan through them. When he got to an entry that involved an experience she’d had with drugs, he said, according to Amanda, “oh you do drugs? That’s the kind of person you are?”
“I thought there was an amendment that said persons were safe in their houses and papers,” Amanda said. “I can’t explain how violated and scared I felt when they were going through my stuff.”
After 30 to 40 minutes – Amanda said she lost track of time – a different commanding officer gave her back her things and released her to the bus to return to Queens. She recounted a guard jibing at her as she left: “‘She is probably just going to pull that right back out and take more pictures,’ ” he said.
The first thing Amanda did after leaving Rikers was reply to that “be careful” text, letting her friend know that she was right and that she should have been more cautious.
To this day, Amanda supposes she must have committed a crime.
“I was actually extremely lucky that they let me go,” she told the Free Press. “You can’t take pictures of prisons and it makes sense to me why you can’t.”
According to Adam Goldstein of the Student Law Press Center, however, Amanda, like many others, is actually confused about her rights.
“The point is that you can take a picture of anything you can see,” Goldstein said.
He also said the officers had no right to delete Amanda’s pictures and that they accumulatively violated dozens of her civil rights. Every time they deleted a photo, read a journal entry or a text message, the guards engaged in discrete offenses and legal missteps, beginning first with their insistence that photographing outside the jail was illegal, Goldstein said.
Also, according to Goldstein, even if the guards believed Amanda committed a crime, they needed to read her her rights before going any further.
“Correctional officers are basically cops [in that they are obligated to read detainees with the Miranda rights],” Goldstein said. “If they think you did something illegal and they want to interrogate you, they must first read you your rights and remind you that you don’t have to cooperate.”
Furthermore, the officers should not have forced her to use her passcode to unlock her phone for them, Goldstein said. This is a legal technicality Goldstein believes should be made clear to all student journalists as well as all citizens who find themselves on facing run-ins with the law: neither correctional officers or police have the right to ask you to unlock your phone if it has a numerical passcode.
“Officers also don’t have the right to make you put in your passcode. It is your absolute constitutional right to withhold it. If they think they the phone is a tool of a crime, they can’t force you to incriminate yourself,” Goldstein said.
They do, however, have the right to ask you to unlock your phone – if you’ve already been arrested – with a fingerprint code, according to Goldstein, though they’re not allowed to force you to do either. (Your fingerprints aren’t covered by the Fifth Amendment since, if you’ve been arrested, law enforcement is required to take your fingerprints.)
Peggie Cruz, a spokeswoman for the Department Of Corrections, which runs the Rikers jail facility, couldn’t cite any law that might justify Amanda’s detainment.
“I suppose I don’t know then [what the actual law is],” she said.
Cruz suggested calling the Department of Correction’s general information for getting specific rules of Rikers, a call that also failed to provide any clarity.
“We couldn’t tell you why detaining the student like that was legal,” said Dennett, who refused to provide a last name and hung up after repeated requests for it. “You would need to speak to either the officers involved or lawyers to get legal expertise because we don’t know any special laws here,” she said.
Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, not only agreed that what happened to Amanda was illegal, but also suggested that she could successfully sue the Department of Corrections if she wanted.
“Anything you can see with your own two eyes from a place where it is legal for you to stand is yours to photograph,” said LoMonte, who stated that not only was what happened to the student a clear crossing of constitutional lines, but that this is indeed a growing trend.
“The federal government has been successfully sued multiple times by the ACLU over the harassment and detention of photojournalists outside of federal buildings, to the point where the Department of Homeland Security has now circulated an agency-wide memo telling its employees to stop interfering with photographers lawfully photography the exterior of buildings,” he added.
While Amanda said she didn’t want to press charges, Goldstein offered an alternative.
“If she doesn’t want to sue, I know a place that would be interested in knowing about this: the New York City Law Department,” Goldstein said.
According to Goldstein, the New York City Law Department, which has about 800 lawyers representing the mayor, the city and its many agencies, would certainly be a call someone, in a situation like Amanda’s, would want to make.
While the cases that they handle are 80 percent geared towards tedious legal disputes such as people suing over damages caused by potholes, Goldstein said, the other 20 percent includes work in the Special Litigation Section, one of several sections in the Civil Rights division, that is centered on such cases about correctional officers who abuse their authority.
“It is worth calling the Law Department because it is in the best interest of those lawyers (if they want to win their cases in court) to reeducate these people [the correctional officers],” Goldstein said. “Lawyers can say (to CO’s) ‘if you’re screwing up, that’s a bad day for me’.”
Goldstein said the lawyers can tell CO’s that if they want to be represented, they’ll need to clean up their act. He continued, explaining how lawyers would be a lot less interested in defending CO’s in cases where they abuse their authority if they suspect continuous misconduct.
“The lawyers will say to themselves, ‘Do I know [the CO] did anything illegal? No, but this is the kind of thing that happens over there.’ and they won’t want to cover things up for crooked officers in the future.”