The Legal Aid Society, Brooklyn Defender Services, The Bronx Defenders, New York County Defender Services, Queens Defenders and Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem called on Governor Andrew Cuomo, Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie to enact an ambitious agenda of urgent and necessary criminal legal reforms when session convenes early 2021, reports POLITICO.

The letter states:

As New York City’s public defenders, we write to share our legislative priorities for criminal legal reform at an extraordinary moment in history. We serve hundreds of thousands low-income people, overwhelmingly Black and Latinx New Yorkers, who have been devastated by COVID-19, brutalized by police violence, subjected to the abject cruelty of the federal immigration system, and incarcerated under lethal conditions in city jails and state prisons.

The needs of the people we serve were set in stark relief during the reckoning that followed George Floyd’s murder—in the midst of an unprecedented pandemic and in the wake of thousands of Black lives so recently lost to police violence and white supremacy. Those forces have inspired a global movement for racial justice that demands concrete action from policymakers across the country. Albany must act, and it must directly confront a criminal legal system that has long dehumanized the people we serve.

“Not only is there a supermajority, but there is a Legislature elected on a mandate for further and more ambitious criminal justice reform,” said Corey Stoughton, Attorney-in-Charge of the Special Litigation Unit with the Criminal Defense Practice at The Legal Aid Society.