The Legal Aid Society, filed a lawsuit today challenging the systemic, unlawful delays in providing competency restoration treatment to people found unfit to stand trial and committed to a state hospital under New York’s Criminal Procedure Law § 730.

As a result of the delays, hundreds of New Yorkers — many with serious psychiatric disabilities and disproportionately Black and Latinx — are routinely left to languish for months on Rikers Island in horrific conditions while they await the court-ordered mental health treatment necessary to proceed with their cases. These prolonged delays violate their rights under the U.S. Constitution, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Rehabilitation Act.

The lead plaintiffs are two New York City residents with psychiatric disabilities. Despite criminal court findings that they are unfit to stand trial and require treatment, OMH placed both plaintiffs on months-long waitlists for secure hospital beds without conducting any assessment of whether they could safely receive treatment in a more integrated, community-based setting.

Both remain incarcerated at Rikers Island, where they are not receiving treatment and are exposed to harmful conditions that make it harder for them to be restored to fitness.

“These individuals are not serving a sentence—they sit in jail, without timely necessary treatment solely because of widespread failures of the State and its city partners,” said Elena Landriscina, Supervising Attorney with the Special Litigation Unit, Criminal Law Reform, at Legal Aid. “Our clients—and hundreds of others like them—are trapped in legal limbo, deteriorating in a jail system utterly unequipped to meet their needs.”