Katherine Rosenfeld

Three Laws the Courts Had Already Erased

New York courts invalidated three loitering provisions. The words remained in police materials, officers kept charging people, and Katherine Rosenfeld’s class actions required more than a declaration that the laws were void. They required enforcement mechanisms that stopped new summonses and vacated prior cases.

One provision criminalized loitering to beg. Another used the statute’s language to target loitering for sexual conduct. A third reached people remaining in a transportation facility without a satisfactory explanation. Courts invalidated the provisions in 1992, 1983, and 1988.

Invalidation did not remove the text from every NYPD reference sheet, summons package, precinct chart, or officer habit. Brown v. Kelly and Casale v. Kelly followed the difference between the law announced by courts and the law still enforced on the street.

Seven Hundred Seventy-Two Summonses after the Order

In June 2005, a federal court directed New York City to stop enforcing the begging provision. Officers nevertheless issued 772 summonses under it during the next nineteen months.

Rosenfeld and co-counsel returned with charging data and discovery showing that precinct reference sheets continued to list the void offenses. From June 2007 through February 2010, the parties identified hundreds more summonses under the three provisions.

A single unlawful charge might be explained as individual mistake. Repeated charges after a court order implicated training, form design, supervision, record systems, and whether the department had implemented the judgment at all.

When Court Orders Go Unenforced

In April 2010, the district court held the City in contempt. It allowed a six-month period for compliance and imposed escalating fines for future violations. The court also sanctioned the loss of at least thirty-four paper summonses.

Future violations would trigger escalating monetary consequences, and missing evidence would alter the City’s position in the litigation.

An initial judgment did not end the work. Monitoring data showed whether the organization changed; contempt, sanctions, fees, or a court-appointed manager became necessary when it did not.

Vacating Twenty-Two Thousand Cases

The 2012 class settlement created a $15 million fund for approximately 22,000 people charged between 1983 and 2012. Compensation addressed the loss imposed by an unlawful summons or arrest. The equitable terms addressed the legal record that remained after the encounter.

The settlement directed state courts to vacate, dismiss, and seal qualifying cases through a coordinated process. Where sealing law required it, related fingerprints and photographs were to be destroyed. The NYPD agreed to annual training, warnings on new summons packages, and review of unofficial precinct “cheat sheets.”

Thirty-Eight Hours in an Inaccessible Station

Robert Filer was paralyzed from the chest down and used a wheelchair. After his arrest, officers placed him unsecured in a police van. He fell to the floor and was thrown around as the vehicle moved.

At the station, the physical barriers continued. The facility and cell were inaccessible. Filer alleged that officers chained him to a wall for thirty-eight hours and left him unable to use the bathroom.

Rosenfeld handled the matter while serving as Legal Director of New York Lawyers for the Public Interest. The 2017 settlement required the NYPD to create its first Americans with Disabilities Act-compliant policy for transporting arrested wheelchair users in accessible vehicles. NYLPI continued to monitor compliance.

Accessibility as an Operating Procedure

The legal duty could not be satisfied by declaring that wheelchair users were welcome. The settlement had to reach dispatch, vehicle availability, securement equipment, station selection, transfer between locations, bathroom access, officer training, and the procedure used when an accessible van was not immediately nearby.

The choice of vehicle and restraints determined whether Filer could travel safely. A van used for someone who could brace or stand created a different danger for a passenger whose body required securement and support.

Monitoring tested whether dispatchers and officers could obtain an accessible vehicle during an actual arrest.

A Ride the Passenger Could Understand

Access-A-Ride is New York City’s federally required paratransit service for people whose disabilities prevent them from using the regular transit system. Applicants undergo interviews and disability evaluations, schedule rides, receive determinations, and communicate about changes and appeals.

Immigrant New Yorkers with limited English proficiency challenged a system that required them to bring and pay for their own interpreters while critical documents remained available only in English. Rosenfeld directed the case at NYLPI with clients and pro bono counsel.

The 2015 Jorge settlement required interpretation during hotline calls, application-center visits, and disability evaluations, along with translation of critical documents and acceptance of paperwork in the applicant’s language. Those services had to remain available from the initial application through evaluation, scheduling, and any appeal.

The Video the City Reviewed and Lost

Kadeem John was eighteen when he entered the adolescent jail on Rikers Island after jumping a turnstile. His lawsuit described “the Program,” a system in which gang-affiliated detainees controlled telephones, seating, and cigarettes through threats and beatings carried out with correction officers’ knowledge.

An assault left John with permanent neurological injury and severe kidney damage. Officials reviewed surveillance footage after an investigation was requested. The recording was not preserved.

Rosenfeld represented John with Jonathan Abady, Adam Pulver, and Legal Aid’s Prisoners’ Rights Project. In March 2012, the district court barred defendants from describing the missing video and authorized an instruction that the recording had existed, had been destroyed, and would have supported John’s account.

Spoliation Changes the Trial

A missing recording cannot be restored by asking a witness to remember what it showed. Spoliation doctrine instead changes what the remaining parties may say and what the jury may infer.

The sanction prevented the City from gaining advantage through testimony about evidence it had failed to preserve. It also permitted the jury to consider the loss as supporting John’s version. The City later paid $850,000 to resolve his claim.

Surveillance footage could have fixed the officers’ locations, timing, warnings, and response, and shown whether the Program operated with official knowledge. Its loss removed a neutral record from every one of those disputed questions.

The Remediation Manager

Rosenfeld also served as class counsel in Nunez v. City of New York, the systemic challenge to excessive force in City jails. A 2015 consent judgment imposed hundreds of requirements and created independent monitoring.

Monitoring produced a continuing record of force, supervision, investigations, discipline, staffing, and compliance. In November 2024, the district court found the City in contempt of all eighteen provisions presented on the plaintiffs’ motion.

The court then ordered an independent remediation manager with authority to address persistent noncompliance. In January 2026, it selected former Vermont corrections commissioner Nicholas Deml. The June 2026 monitor report credited early cooperation from new leadership while finding that the risk of harm had not materially declined.

Nunez required years of monitoring, a contempt ruling, and appointment of an independent remediation manager. The consent judgment, monitor, contempt ruling, and remediation manager governed what the jail had to do after individual claims were resolved.

Thirty Hours of Restraints during Labor

One pregnant plaintiff was arrested for a misdemeanor at forty weeks. She alleged that officers and supervisors kept her restrained for approximately thirty hours during transport, active labor, and recovery with her infant daughter despite repeated requests from medical staff.

The 2019 settlement provided $610,000 and revisions to the NYPD Patrol Guide. A written procedure had to define when restraints could be used, who could authorize them, how medical instructions would be followed, and what officers must document.

A second plaintiff was twenty-two and more than forty weeks pregnant when arrested in 2018. She alleged that officers kept her handcuffed and shackled for hours during labor and after the birth of her son. The 2021 settlement provided $750,000 and department-wide roll-call training on the treatment of pregnant people.

The Rule Must Be Written and Taught

The two settlements used different forms of prospective relief. The first revised a standing procedure. The second required instruction delivered across the department.

New York Correction Law section 611 prohibited restraints of any kind during hospital delivery and recovery. Rosenfeld’s criticism addressed the gap between that statewide standard and NYPD practice.

Written policy, supervisor responsibility, medical deference, and roll-call training convert the legal prohibition into instructions officers can follow during transport, labor, delivery, and recovery.

Required to Appear, Exposed to Arrest

African Communities Together and The Door filed suit in August 2025 over federal practices at New York immigration courts. People were required to attend hearings in order to pursue asylum or other relief. ICE agents were arresting people in or near those courthouses.

The suit also challenged a practice in which government lawyers made oral motions to dismiss removal proceedings, exposing people leaving the courtroom to arrest and expedited removal before their pending claims could be heard.

Rosenfeld represents the organizational plaintiffs with ECBAWM lawyers, the NYCLU, ACLU, and Make the Road New York. The case links courthouse access, agency guidance, immigration-court procedure, and Administrative Procedure Act review.

The Courthouse-Arrest Memorandum’s Limits

In September 2025, the district court stayed the dismissal policy in Manhattan and the Bronx but initially declined to halt courthouse arrests. The ruling rested partly on the shared understanding that 2025 ICE guidance regulated arrests at immigration courts.

Government counsel later notified the court that ICE had informed them the guidance did not, and never had, applied there. Under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 54, the court could revise its interlocutory ruling before final judgment.

On May 18, 2026, the court found a substantial likelihood that rescinding the narrower 2021 courthouse rules without any replacement policy for immigration courts was arbitrary and capricious. The stay restored those earlier restrictions at 26 Federal Plaza, 201 Varick Street, and 290 Broadway while the action continued.

June and July filings then addressed alleged arrests after the stay and the discovery needed to test ICE approvals, training, and compliance. The May order governs courthouse access while the parties develop the merits.

Class Mechanics across Different Institutions

Rosenfeld has also handled class cases outside police and prison litigation. She helped obtain a $6.632 million settlement for hundreds of former medical residents whose claims involved FICA tax refunds, hospital disclosures, commercial tort theories, consolidation, and Rule 23 notice.

A class must be defined, common questions identified, individual records located, notice delivered, claims administered, and relief allocated in a form the court can approve.

From 2014 through 2017, Rosenfeld served as NYLPI’s Legal Director, leading litigation and policy campaigns concerning disability, transportation, education, immigration, housing, public accommodations, language access, criminal justice, and health conditions. She later returned to ECBAWM as a partner.

Making the Rule Work

Rosenfeld graduated from the University of Chicago and Yale Law School, clerked for Judge Dean Pregerson, and began her career in prisoners’ rights and employment discrimination. She now handles civil-rights, employment, discrimination, commercial, class, trial, and appellate matters.

The named cases span void statutes, wheelchair transport, paratransit language access, missing jail video, systemic force, restraints during labor, and immigration courthouses.

The underlying rules already existed: courts had invalidated the loitering laws, the ADA required access, state law restricted pregnancy restraints, and a consent judgment governed Rikers. The lawyers alleged that violations continued after the rules took effect.

The resulting remedies included vacated cases, accessible vehicles, interpreters, adverse inferences, a remediation manager, revised patrol guidance, department-wide training, and courthouse protections.