Woman reaches settlement with NYPD, NYC after being shackled during labor

(Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

By Anthony Payero

(THE BRONX, N.Y.) An African American woman who says she was shackled on her wrists and ankles during her active labor at a city hospital reached a settlement with the city of New York and the New York City Police Department, according to CNN.

She was apprehended two days after her scheduled due date in late 2018 on a misdemeanor assault charge that was later dismissed and sealed, her attorneys said to CNN. According to a lawsuit, she entered labor the same day she was arrested.

She filed a lawsuit against New York City and numerous NYPD officers anonymously in October for damages caused by emotional distress, a violation of her civil rights, punitive damages, attorney fees and costs. During a court appearance Wednesday, a US district magistrate judge for the Eastern District of New York agreed on a $750,000 settlement for the woman and her baby. The settlement states it is not an admission by the defendants that they defied the woman's rights.

The young mother told CNN she was forced to give birth while handcuffed to the hospital bed with just a nurse holding her hand. She said she was not transported to her intended hospital for the birth, but to a hospital in a different part of the city, and without the baby's father, her family or the prenatal care physician she was seeing present.

"The NYPD arresting officers knew that (she) was extremely pregnant, remarking on it to her as they took her into custody," the lawsuit said. "There was no urgent need to arrest (her) that day."

"That was not my birth plan. I felt like a failure to my unborn because that wasn't something that was planned for neither of us," she anonymously told CNN. "I just didn't feel like myself anymore after that. I feel like my memory got taken away. And still, I'm in pain."

The woman was apprehended on December 17, 2018, at her home for a misdemeanor assault that allegedly happened the prior week, according to the lawsuit. Her attorneys told CNN she never resisted arrest or presented a flight risk. The charge was later dropped, according to her attorneys Anne Oredeko, supervising attorney of the racial justice unit at The Legal Aid Society, and Katherine Rosenfeld, a partner at Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel.

"The first breath that this baby had on this earth was one born out of violence. That was violence, what the NYPD did to her," Oredeko told CNN. "This lawsuit was meant as a way to give her some type of solace, but there's no repairing that -- money will never repair that. And she cannot get that moment back."

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