EXCLUSIVE: Bronx woman, wrongfully jailed and forced to spend 3 days at Rikers Island, actually told by court officer, ‘Sorry about your weekend'
Summer began with a holiday in hell for a Bronx, N.Y., woman who spent Memorial Day weekend on Rikers Island after being arrested on a case that was closed three years earlier, the Daily News has learned.
New York woman: I was jailed for three days by mistake at Rikers Island
Officers who came to take Raven Moses’ information regarding a car accident also ran her name through a criminal database and found she was wanted on an active arrest warrant from 2009. She said cops saw she had pleaded guilty and had served a year in jail — but that they tossed her into Rikers anyway.
Raven Moses says that after her car was sideswiped May 25 on the Queensboro Bridge in New York, she called 911. Once accident report was completed, she claims, cops wrongly arrested and jailed her on an old warrant. Now she plans to sue for $3 million.
Summer began with a holiday in hell for a Bronx, N.Y., woman who spent Memorial Day weekend on Rikers Island after being arrested on a case that was closed three years earlier, the Daily News has learned.
Raven Moses, 30, was driving on the Queensboro Bridge on May 25 when she was swiped by another driver, who fled the scene. When Moses got to work at her telemarketing job in Astoria in Queens, N.Y.,she called 911.
That’s when her Kafkaesque nightmare began.
Arriving officers took down the information for an accident report — but also ran Moses’ name through a criminal database and discovered she was wanted on an active arrest warrant from a 2009 fraud case.
Moses said the officers also saw on their computer readout that she had pleaded guilty to the charge and had served one year in jail of a one-to-three-year sentence — evidence that she had already paid her debt to society.
But the cops threw her in jail anyway, Moses and her lawyer say. She was at Rikers for three days.
“The facts and circumstances surrounding the old warrant were … ignored by the officers,” said Moses’ lawyer, Sanford Rubenstein, who has filed initial paperwork for a $3 million wrongful arrest suit.
The cops told Moses they couldn’t reach anyone in the courthouse to verify her story because of the holiday. Once the long holiday weekend was over, Moses was cut loose that Tuesday afternoon without even seeing a judge.
Raven Moses, shown here at her attorney Sanford Rubenstein's office in Brooklyn, N.Y., allages she was arrested for an open warrant that had been vacated three years earlier.
Aaron Showalter/New York Daily News
Raven Moses, shown here at her attorney Sanford Rubenstein's office in Brooklyn, N.Y., allages she was arrested for an open warrant that had been vacated three years earlier.
“A court officer apologized to me, saying, ‘Sorry about your weekend,’” Moses told The News.
Her lawyer said he was appalled that such a thing could happen.
“The city is liable for negligently failing to remove an old arrest warrant from its system,” Rubenstein said.
A police spokesman said the arresting officer and her supervisor had verified the warrant was active. But the same spokesman could not explain why the warrant remained open all these years.
The warrant was vacated in the police computer system May 30, after Moses’ ordeal.
Moses said she now carries a certificate of disposition of the criminal case in her wallet with her at all times.
“I’m terrified of the police,” she said. “I’m afraid this is going to happen again.
“This has been a major setback for me; I was doing the right thing, and I was penalized.”
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york...-days-mistake-article-1.1443123#ixzz2dkWVrRMX
