NYC Will Pay $750,000 to Pregnant Woman Police Cuffed While in Labor

An African-American mother of two has agreed to a $750,000 settlement with the City of New York after police officers kept her in handcuffs during labor and after delivery. The woman’s lawsuit arose over hours of abuse the woman suffered in December 2018, when she was arrested on a minor assault charge two days after her due date. The shocking case called into question the NYPD’s faulty policy regarding the use of restraints on pregnant women, which violated a 2015 law and, even after revisions, remains vague and problematic.

The anonymous woman’s ordeal began on December 17, 2018, when she was arrested at her Brooklyn home on a misdemeanor assault charge, stemming from an incident a week earlier. The charge was ultimately dismissed. Despite her visible condition ruling her out as a flight risk or a threat to resist, police handcuffed her and transported her to a holding cell at a Brooklyn precinct. While in the cell, she went into labor, but her cries for help went unheeded by cops enjoying a holiday party.

Eventually, she was able to tell a female officer she needed medical care, but alleges in her lawsuit that the officer told her to lie down on a bench and remove her pants and undergarments for an "inspection" of her "vaginal area." Asked about that degrading incident, the woman told CNN, "I felt disgusted ... because I'm in a dirty jail cell and an officer says I need to lay on something so she could look in my private area to see if my baby is coming."

Before midnight, the woman was shackled to a gurney and taken via ambulance to a hospital, where medical exams were performed while still shackled. She was then taken to the delivery room in handcuffs, “despite at least one nurse asking for them to be removed.” An officer on the scene would not remove the cuffs, citing an “unspecified policy.” The senior counsel for the New York City Law Department, Kimberly Joyce indicated this referred to the NYPD's Patrol Guide, which was revised in early 2020. Ms. Joyce also claimed NYPD training had been "subsequently enhanced, with input from the parties in this case."

The officer finally agreed to remove the cuffs, but only “after nurses informed him that [the woman] needed to begin pushing and that the handcuffs were preventing her from receiving an epidural." She delivered a baby boy at 6 a.m. on December 18. But only one hour later, “the woman was handcuffed again, and she struggled to breastfeed her baby while in restraints.” CNN reports that “The mother's restraints were permanently removed December 19 after she had a video arraignment, and she and her son were discharged the next day.”

If you’re appalled at this recitation of facts, it’s probably because you operate with common sense and have some degree of empathy for women in the rigors of childbirth. That should have been enough to prompt officers to rethink their questionable training. If you’re thinking, “At least this will never happen again,” you might want to know it had happened only months before in February 2018. In that case, the City not only paid the woman $610,000, but officials promised to reform the NYPD Patrol Guide "’to better address safety and medical concerns’ of arrestees in late stages of pregnancy and through childbirth.”

But here’s the kicker: their treatment of both women was clearly contrary to the law enacted in 2015, which prohibits the shackling of women in labor with limited exceptions, which did not apply in this instance. That law, on the books for three years before these incidents, prohibits restraints of any kind on pregnant women who are "in labor, admitted to a hospital, institution or clinic for delivery, or recovering after giving birth." The law does allow exceptions if officers "in consultation with the chief medical officer" find that cuffs "are necessary to prevent such woman from injuring herself or medical or correctional personnel." There is no indication that officers held such a consultation during any of the times they had these women in restraints.

That February case led to a rule being set in the NYPD Patrol Guide that officers must restrain pregnant women "in the least restrictive manner possible," but that a woman in labor “should not be handcuffed or restrained, but may only be restrained after delivery under "’exceptional circumstances,’" which must be “determined by the immediate supervisor on a case-by-case basis." But that revision to the NYPD Patrol Guide was only released on July 1, 2020.

It bears mentioning that, in addition to the emotional and physical hardship caused by the unnecessary use of restraints, the woman was also denied access to the doctor who had guided her through her pregnancy and was expected to deliver her child. Given the range of serious injuries sustained by mothers and their babies during labor and delivery, the treatment of this mother was unconscionable. NYPD must improve its policies and training to ensure this never happens again.