City to Pay Penalties to Homeless People

[IzzyR]

City to Pay Millions to Homeless Forced to Sleep in an Office

New York City has agreed to pay millions of dollars in penalties dating to 1995 to homeless families who were forced to stay overnight in a Bronx office while awaiting emergency shelter, a violation of court orders.

The penalties the city will pay have accrued since 1995, when it agreed in a consent decree to pay up to $150 per night to families who had sought emergency shelter but were instead kept overnight in the Emergency Assistance Unit, the Bronx office that is the city’s primary intake center for homeless families.

In 1994, the Giuliani administration entered into a consent decree to pay automatic contempt fines to families who were not placed in a shelter on the day they requested it, but instead ended up spending the night sleeping on benches, desks and the floor of the E.A.U., an office building in the Bronx unequipped to serve as shelter.
In 1995, the Giuliani administration paid all contempt fines that had accrued retroactive to 1991, which amounted to more than $5 million. But after that, Rudolph W. Giuliani, then the mayor, and advocates for the homeless disagreed about how the fines should be paid going forward — the advocates wanted cash payments and the city wanted to set up a generalized program to pay for goods like furniture or clothing.

The fundamental problem that I have with this type of thing is it presents aid to the unfortunate as being a monetary obligation of society - and by extension the taxpayers. As I see it, it should be a voluntary - if laudable - goal. So that if it is not performed, one might decide to try to do better, but would now owe anyone damages, as if one had harmed them.

I am aware that this decision is the result of the city not living up to a consent decree, and the courts have to have a means of enforcing these orders. But the consent decree itself was not arrived at in a vacuum - apparently the legal case against the city was such that they could be pushed to enter into one. And in any event, even if the fines were unavoidable, I would adopt the city’s position that they should be made in the form of general societal benefits. The position of the homeless advocates, which ultimately prevailed, was that they should be made to the homeless people themselves - a position that implies that they had been harmed and were entitled to compensation. That had not, and were not, IMHO.

[december]

I have run into a case at work, and read about others, where a judge used a consent decree to exert control far beyond her apparent powers. The gimmick seems to work like this:

A judge has the power to punish an organization which has been sued. The organization may be a governmental body or a private organization. In order to avoid punishment, the organization consents to some action or way of behavior – something that the judge did not have the power to directly impose. E.g., in the case I know about, a group of airline insurers agreed to require certain behavior by its members.

In some cases, the consent decree remains in effect for an indefinint period of time – essentially forever. The consent decree then has the power of a law. In a way it may be stronger than a law, because it cannot be overturned by the organization.

I would invite one of our fine SDMB attorneys to explain this in greater detail.