By LARRY NEUMEISTER
Associated Press
NEW YORK — It is unconstitutional to presume that hearings where civil fines are imposed on people who violate rules of a city bus or subway system are closed to the public, a judge has ruled.
U.S. District Judge Richard Sullivan said the hearings operate with many of the same legal rules as a court proceeding and are entitled to the same First Amendment protection. Although his written decision was signed Dec. 23, it was released publicly Dec. 28.
The decision came in a lawsuit brought by the New York Civil Liberties Union against the New York City Transit Authority, which operates the city’s 27 subway lines and 243 bus routes, providing more than 2.3 billion rides in 2008. Also last year, the agency staged more than 20,000 hearings to process alleged violations of rules in the transit system.
Sullivan rejected arguments by lawyers for the transit authority who said the agency wanted to protect the privacy of people who challenge alleged rule violations and ensure that they would not fail to attend a hearing out of fear that their case might be made public.
The Transit Authority said its policy was that members of the press or the wider public could only attend a hearing if the person who was challenging a rule violation gave permission.
Sullivan said defendants at civil and criminal court proceedings would likely prefer the same ability to control whether their hearings were public.
“Such a desire, however, does not suffice to defeat the First Amendment right of access,” the judge wrote.
Sullivan noted that many of the same legal rules were followed at the hearings as occur in court proceedings. For instance, those challenging a citation have the right to an attorney, the right to cross-examine the police officer and the right to produce documents and witnesses.
Police officers issue the citations, and it is up to their discretion whether to require that they be processed in criminal court, where penalties can include a jail sentence, or before the Transit Adjudication Bureau, where no jail time is possible.
In a statement, the city’s transit authority said it was reviewing the decision. It said the hearings have never been secretive or closed-door, “and any suggestion to the contrary would be simply inaccurate.”
It said it had sought to protect privacy by letting those challenging citations “object to the presence of a stranger sitting a matter of inches away from them when they testify as to the sometimes-personal circumstances giving rise to the summons.”
NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman said the ruling confirms that there is “no room for a secret court in New York City.”
The NYCLU said the police department in recent years has issued up to 171,000 citations annually for violations such as fare evasion, public intoxication, unreasonable noise and obstructing pedestrian traffic.
The citations from 2005 to 2008 have resulted in more than 22,000 hearings annually at offices in Brooklyn, with guilty judgments issued in more than 83 percent of the contested cases, the civil-liberties group said.
The civil-rights group’s associate legal director, Christopher Dunn, said the NYCLU plans to monitor the hearings in the future to ensure that they are conducted fairly and to track police enforcement activity in the transit system.
In its lawsuit, the agency said the number of subway riders stopped and questioned by police officers grew dramatically from 2,474 in 2003 to 38,552 in 2007, with studies showing that 88 percent of those subjected to police stops in the subway system were black or Latino.