Kaazim Freeman was found dead in his jail cell on September 6, 2019, at Wende Correctional Facility. After the death, the decedent’s family, through counsel at Barket Epstein Kearon Aldea & LoTurco, LLP, initiated a series of attempts to obtain information from the facility explaining what had happened. On March 2, 2021, counsel issued a FOIL request to the New York State Commission of Correction, seeking records relating to the investigation surrounding the death. Counsel thereafter received a response from New York State denying the request. And counsel then appealed the denial, still to no avail, as the State again persisted in withholding all records of the investigation surrounding the death.
Operating under this cloud of uncertainty but governed by a strict timetables for filing suit against New York State, counsel filed suit against New York State interposing a series of theories of how the death occurred based on the limited evidence made available to Mr. Freeman's family—including an assault by guards or, alternatively, an assault by other prisoners.
During the course of the discovery that then ensued, counsel, led by Alexander Klein, was finally able to obtain the investigative files surrounding Mr. Freeman’s death and to depose certain central witnesses to the incident. In the process, counsel uncovered disturbing evidence indicating an instrumentality of Mr. Freeman's death that had not been theorized in his pleadings: that New York State was on actual or constructive notice of a risk that Mr. Freeman would engage in self-harm, took no reasonable precautions to prevent it, and that this culminated in his suicide.
Armed with this new evidence, Klein moved to amend the claim to allege that the State was negligent in failing to take reasonable precautions to prevent Mr. Freeman’s foreseeable self-harm. Nevertheless, New York State responded with a wholesale attempt to leverage the very same cloud of uncertainty it had created in the initial aftermath of Mr. Freeman's death—arguing that the strict timetables for bringing claims against New York State had expired, and that the allegedly new theory of Mr. Freeman's death—a suicide rather than a homicide—was too different from the initial pleadings to allow it to relate back to the timing of the initial filing.
The stakes of this argument were high, because in the field of prisoner litigation—particularly in cases involving deaths—claimants are often forced to operate in the initial stages of litigation behind a veil of ignorance imposed by the prison. If the State could then leverage that ignorance to choke off new claims that emerge from discovery, it would incentive prisons to keep evidence buried for as long as possible rather than being responsive to simple FOIL requests; it would incentivize litigants to draft grossly overbroad pleadings just to guard against the risk of unanticipated theories being barred; and it would leave a trail of victims of civil rights abuses for whom the courthouse doors get closed because of tactical decision made by prisons about disclosure-timing rather than substantive issues relating to the strength of their actual claims.
Confronted with these stakes, the New York Court of Claims cogently agreed with Klein's arguments about why the amended claim should be accepted under the circumstances, and granted leave to amend the pleadings. Recognizing the stakes of the issue, New York State then appealed the decision up to the Appellate Division, Fourth Department. And there, after extensive briefing and oral argument, Klein again prevailed—this time cementing this important decision in caselaw from an appeals court with jurisdiction over the counties that house many of the largest prisons in all of New York State.
The respondent's brief and decision can be viewed here: