The Legal Aid Society filed this amicus brief at the New York Court of Appeals in support of Shyheid Gibson, who was placed on electronic monitoring with house arrest upon being released pursuant to the C.P.L. 30.30 speedy trial statute. Legal Aid argued that the New York State Legislature intended electronic monitoring to be a condition of last resort to spare an individual from the horrors of physical jail when it made the technology available for pretrial use in 2020. The central question presented by the case is: where an individual who has not been spared the horrors of jail – whom the prosecution has let languish behind bars for months or even years without a trial – and that person is entitled to release because of this failure, did the Legislature intend for courts to be able to swap jail for electronic monitoring?  

In our brief, we argued that the answer is no, that Mr. Gibson’s placement was not “just or reasonable,” and that, if allowed to stand, the lower court’s ruling to the opposite would drastically expand the degrading surveillance of New Yorkers, who have for decades been released on their own recognizance following protracted prosecutorial delay. We also explained for the Court the physical, social, financial, and psychological harms of electronic monitoring. In October 2025, the Court of Appeals deemed the issue moot, as Mr. Gibson had been released from electronic monitoring during the pendency of the appeal. 

This brief was written by attorneys in Criminal Law Reform’s Decarceration Project.