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Two death row prisoners were exonerated in 2022 as society’s ultimate sanction became more geographically isolated, with only a handful of states carrying out executions in the last year, according to a new report. The number of botched executions also reached an “astonishing” level, according to the research by the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington […]

The post Botched executions reached ‘astonishing’ high in 2022, report finds appeared first on Missouri Independent.

Amendment 3 authorized cities and counties to levy a 3% tax on pot sales. Bills to put the tax increase on the April 4 ballot are advancing across the St. Louis area.

The nonprofit already operates four adult high schools in Missouri, with locations in St. Louis, Springfield, Poplar Bluff and Columbia.

Sharon Osbourne is obviously back on her feet after being rushed to the hospital for a "medical emergency" over the weekend. As reported, The Osbournes matriarch fell ill while shooting…

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“We’ve had critical Black thinkers since the beginning of time. Those books are published and out on the streets, and need to stay in circulation,” the owner said.

The Post-Dispatch obtained video of inmates coming to the guard’s rescue following the assault.

According to AP, Dybvig has been questioned by Washington University's Title IX office, and his lawyer dismisses the allegations as "professional rivalry."

Much like the company’s dedication to women, AT&T’s dedication to not funding people eager to overthrow democracy appears to be somewhere between inconsistent and nonexistent. And the company certainly isn’t alone. Shortly after January 6 a number of companies, including telecom giants like AT&T, publicly crowed about how they’d be ceasing all funding to politicians who […]

A new garden store will open in the Bayer’s Garden Shop’s former location off of Hampton Avenue in the spring. The Garden Shop, headed by couple Lila and Dylan Waier, has no set opening date yet, but will take over Bayer’s former space in April, Lila Waier tells the RFT. Bayer’s closed its south city and Imperial locations in June after more than 80 years of operation.

by Agnel Philip and Eli Hager, ProPublica, and Suzy Khimm, NBC News, photography by Stephanie Mei-Ling, special to ProPublica and NBC News

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — In the months after a West Virginia court permanently took away their right to parent their daughters this past April, Jackie Snodgrass and her husband were left in a quiet house. The kids’ rooms remained untouched. The same dolls and stuffed animals were arranged on their younger daughter’s bed. The same clothes in the closets, becoming outgrown. The same photos on the walls, outdated.

The court had denied a final visit — despite the children continually saying they missed their mother — so the parents never got to say goodbye to them in person. Snodgrass worried about them constantly, especially her older daughter, who has diabetes. An app pinged her intermittently with updates on her child’s blood sugar. Occasionally, it would dip too low or spike too high.

“What if something happens to her?” Snodgrass said. “And if it does, I’m not going to be allowed to be there.”

Once considered a last resort reserved for parents who abandon their children, the involuntary and permanent termination of parental rights now hangs over every mother and father accused of any form of abuse or neglect — including allegations of nonviolent behavior like drug use or truancy, the two central parenting issues in the Snodgrasses’ case. Known in the legal world as the “death penalty” of child welfare, it can happen in a matter of months.

No state terminates parental rights more frequently or faster than West Virginia, according to a ProPublica and NBC News analysis. One in 50 children here experienced the severing of their relationships with both of their parents from 2015 to 2019, the last full year of federal child welfare data available before the pandemic. For most of them, it occurred within 11 months of being removed from their home for the first time.

In the Snodgrasses’ case, it took only five months.

Nationally, the parents of about 327,000 children lost their rights from 2015 to 2019, the analysis found. In one-fifth of those cases, it happened in less than a year.

Over the past 25 years, courts and child protective services agencies have increasingly turned to this ultimate consequence, partly in response to Clinton-era federal policies that support faster adoptions. According to a recent study, the risk that a child will experience the loss of their legal relationship with their parents roughly doubled from 2000 to 2016. One in 100 U.S. children — disproportionately Black and Native American — experience termination through the child welfare system before they turn 18, the study found.

Most of those families became entangled in the system because of allegations of neglect, a broad category closely linked to poverty and substance use. Just 15% of children whose parents’ rights were severed around the country from 2015 to 2019 had been removed from their homes because of concerns about physical or sexual abuse, according to the ProPublica and NBC News analysis. (The reasons ultimately cited for the terminations themselves weren’t provided in the data.)

“None of us believes banishing a child from a family of origin is a perfectly fine result,” said Marty Guggenheim, a retired New York University law professor and child welfare expert who has argued termination cases before the Supreme Court. “But that’s where we are today. We are off of our moral compass.”

West Virginia Terminates Parental Rights Faster Than Any Other State

States differ widely in how quickly they terminate parental rights after a child is first removed from a home.

Note: Dots represent the median time between a child’s first removal from the home and when both of their parents’ rights are terminated. Washington D.C. is included as a state. (Source: ProPublica analysis of National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect records. Graphic by Lucas Waldron/ProPublica.)

The hurry to end families can be traced to the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act, passed with bipartisan support in Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton.

In a tough-on-crime era, the new law was supposed to keep fragile, abused children from languishing for too long in foster care. It created a rigid timeline — a ticking clock — for every child who entered state custody after having been removed from home because of an allegation of child maltreatment. After 15 months, barring specific exemptions, state and local agencies were required to file for termination of the birth parents’ rights or face losing federal funding. And states that increased adoptions were rewarded with bonuses for every additional child they placed.

Despite the law’s goal of getting more kids adopted, tens of thousands of such children have remained in foster care for months or years after being cut off from their parents. They are known as “legal orphans,” with no birth families anymore but no adoptive ones, either.

And research shows that many children who experience termination of their parents’ rights will suffer what is known as ambiguous loss, similar to grieving after a death but without the closure of knowing a loved one is gone forever.

To understand the impact of the child welfare system’s most extreme outcome, ProPublica and NBC News surveyed hundreds of families who experienced termination of parental rights and interviewed dozens of parents, children, caretakers, caseworkers and attorneys. Those we spoke to described a confusing legal system that at times seemed stacked against birth families trying to reunite and inured to the pain of long-term family separation.

“There was all this lost time when me and my dad had wanted to talk to each other but were being prevented by the state government,” said Reed Ridens, a graduate student in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who spent years in foster care as a legal orphan. “There was a lot of damage and a lot of repair that needed to be done between us, and a lot that had been taken away.”

Snodgrass’ kids’ rooms remain untouched. She and her husband, Wes, haven’t seen them in person for over a year.

Some of the 1997 law’s original supporters — and even some top child welfare officials — now warn that the timeline Congress prescribed is too rigid and that some states may have taken the reforms too far.

Maureen Flatley, a child welfare consultant who helped craft the law, said she now believes it urgently needs to be revamped, including the prescribed timeline for terminating parental rights. “We can’t pretend anymore that adoption is just some magic panacea,” she said in an interview.

The federal government also has voiced concerns about focusing too narrowly on termination time frames. In the final days of the Trump administration, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families issued a memo warning states against rushing to end rights.

Jerry Milner, a top official at the agency under President Donald Trump, said the Clinton-era law should be overhauled or repealed. Its timeline was the product of political negotiation, he said, not scientific research on how long parents should be given for recovery or redemption before they lose their rights to their children. “But it’s hanging over parents’ heads like a death sentence,” he said.

Yet the Biden administration has continued to defend the law. The statute allows states to make exceptions to the timeline if they believe termination would not be “in the best interest of the child” or if the state has failed to provide adequate reunification services, an ACF spokesperson said in response to written questions. Decisions are to be made on a case-by-case basis, the agency added.

And recent attempts by Congress to revise the timeline have failed to gain much traction.

Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, D-Fla., believes it’s imperative for lawmakers to try once more: She plans to introduce a child welfare bill in the next Congress to allow states to extend the timeline for termination to 24 months, among other changes.

“The harsh timeline doesn’t allow people to be rehabilitated or give them a chance to be reunited with their children,” she said.

Five Months to End a Family

Jackie Snodgrass and her husband, Wes, attracted the attention of West Virginia’s Department of Health and Human Resources in February 2021 because their girls had missed too many days of school. It was a problem that the family and the child protective services agency had tussled over for years, according to court documents Snodgrass provided to ProPublica and NBC News, but it came to a head when their absences piled up amid virtual schooling during the pandemic. Both parents were placed under court-ordered supervision.

The family moved from their tiny town of 1,400 to Wes Snodgrass’ mother’s home in the capital city, Charleston, to be closer to school for the girls, whose attendance was improving. They started a tree-trimming business and were making ends meet.

By October 2021, Jackie Snodgrass was busy planning her older daughter’s dream 16th birthday party — with pink decorations and a DJ, like on MTV.

“I like their birthdays better than Christmas, because it’s just their day,” she said of her children.

But the stress of the move and the truancy case had taken a toll. Snodgrass’ husband said he had used methamphetamine during that time, and in November, on an impulse, she tried it too. When the court overseeing their case started mandating drug screens, both parents failed.

The child welfare agency’s response was immediate: Like many states, West Virginia considers failed drug tests to be proof that a child is in danger, which can lead to the child’s removal. Snodgrass said a caseworker told her and her husband over the phone that they had to immediately pack up and leave the children with her husband’s mother.

After just five months and a few hearings, as the Snodgrasses struggled to comply with court orders, the judge ruled that they were unfit to raise their girls ever again.

They haven’t seen them in person for over a year.

The property in the tiny town of Liberty, West Virginia, where the Snodgrasses lived before they moved their family to Charleston

Jackie Snodgrass’ parents now have custody of the children and plan to adopt them. Her mother said the girls have taken the separation hard, acting out and asking why they can’t see their mom and dad. Visiting is prohibited even though they live 5 miles apart.

In West Virginia, which has been ravaged by drug epidemics in recent decades, children are more likely to enter foster care than anywhere else in the country. Substance use was the most common reason cited for removing children from their homes in the state’s parental rights termination cases, according to the ProPublica and NBC News analysis.

Nearly every state acts more quickly when drugs are involved than when children are removed based on concerns about physical or sexual abuse. But West Virginia is particularly aggressive, giving parents the least amount of time to recover: More than a fifth of the state’s terminations involving parental drug use occurred less than six months after the children were first removed, the news organizations found.

In response to ProPublica and NBC News’ findings, state Del. Danielle Walker, a Democrat, expressed outrage at West Virginia’s haste in terminating parental rights and said the Legislature needed to conduct an intensive study to look at termination and related issues.

“There is no advocacy for the biological parents in this state. There’s none,” said Walker, who said her office would research the subject and compare West Virginia’s child welfare practices to those in other states. “Since when is six months enough to have proper recovery — any kind of recovery?”

Family attorneys and advocates say this posture toward addiction and recreational drug use punishes many parents whose children may not be in danger. Parents who are committed to seeking help to get their children back can be penalized if they relapse, even though drug treatment experts have long said such setbacks are a normal part of recovery.

“It’s a race against the clock for these families to oftentimes deal with a generational trauma,” said Jim McKay, director of Prevent Child Abuse West Virginia, an advocacy group. “We should be partnering with families and working alongside them rather than having it be a prisoner of an arbitrary date on the calendar.”

Ray Kendall, a former caseworker for the state’s Department of Health and Human Resources, said the agency’s “astronomical” workload caused many of his colleagues to become jaded toward substance use cases. West Virginia had 1 caseworker for every 167 children it investigated in 2019. That was among the nation’s highest caseloads, leaving less time for workers to help parents access services that can prevent termination.

“I don’t think six months is enough time to truly become completely sober and able to be in control of your life and take care of your kids, so it is a bit unrealistic,” said Kendall, who left the agency in 2019 in part because of frustrations that he couldn’t do more for families.

West Virginia has also been rewarded by the federal government for acting quickly to end families, having received $24 million in incentive payments under the 1997 law for increasing the number of adoptions it finalizes. (The program expanded in 2014 to include payments for guardianships, in which responsibility for children is transferred to other adults without completely severing parental rights.) Adjusted for child population, West Virginia has brought in 65% more in these incentives than the next highest state, Alaska.

The state’s Department of Health and Human Resources declined to make officials available for interviews. In response to written questions, the department didn’t dispute ProPublica and NBC News’ findings about the frequency and speed of termination in the state; it denied that the state’s statutes and policies fail to provide parents enough time for reunification.

Courts have the discretion “to make individualized decisions based upon the actions of the parents and the best interest of the child,” said Jessica Holstein, a spokesperson for the agency, who added that parents can also appeal the decisions.

Holstein said the agency has tried to reduce caseloads by adding staff members, increasing salaries and using temporary “crisis teams” to backfill vacancies.

“The culture at DHHR supports family connections,” she said, noting that the department prioritizes foster care placements with relatives when possible, as happened in the Snodgrasses’ case.

A trampoline that Snodgrass’ daughters used to play on at their Charleston home

Cindy Largent-Hill, director of the juvenile division of the West Virginia Administrative Office of the Courts, said the state’s termination schedule is meant to prevent cases from dragging on too long.

“They may look a bit unfair because three months doesn’t sound like a long time, or six months, or 12 months,” said Largent-Hill, who works with the state’s circuit court judges. But, she said, “you don’t want cases to languish in court for three, four or five years.”

Snodgrass said she still is shocked by how quickly her case devolved. After the judge’s decision, whenever she felt a glimmer of hope, she would reread the order: “Any and all parental, guardianship, and custodial rights of the respondent parents … are hereby permanently and forever TERMINATED.”

“There’s, like, anger or something behind it,” Snodgrass said. “It seemed way too fast, but it also feels like years since I’ve seen my kids.”

The Push for Permanency

For most of U.S. history, it was rare for courts to permanently cut parents’ legal ties to their children without consent, according to a forthcoming paper by Chris Gottlieb, director of the New York University School of Law Family Defense Clinic. Typically, child welfare cases would end in termination only when states could prove that parents had abandoned their kids or as part of voluntary adoptions.

After states began requiring teachers, doctors and other professionals to report suspected child abuse or neglect in the 1970s, the number of kids entering foster care rose dramatically. In many cases, children stayed for years in out-of-home placements.

By the 1990s, a substantial body of research showed that such long foster care stays could harm child development. At the same time, increased access to birth control and abortion had led to a sharp decline in the number of children available for prospective adoptive parents, according to Gottlieb’s research.

The 1997 federal law was meant to address both trends. Its prominent supporters pointed to high-profile cases in which children were brutally beaten or killed after having been returned to their parents from foster care. Many argued that it was far more important to move children quickly into permanent homes than to spend an indeterminate amount of time trying to “fix” birth families. That ultimately would make more kids available for adoption.

Adoptions out of foster care increased from 31,000 in 1997 to 66,200 by 2019, according to federal data, while the foster care population has declined.

All states now have statutes that meet the federal law’s timeline requiring them to pursue termination if a child has spent 15 of the previous 22 months in the foster system, according to a ProPublica and NBC News survey of all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The law allows states to move slower if a child is placed with relatives but also faster under certain circumstances, such as if a parent has committed a serious criminal offense.

More than 30 states have even tighter timelines, the news organizations found — in some cases when young children are involved, under the rationale that they are in greatest need of immediately stable homes where they can start bonding with permanent families.

In Texas — the only state other than West Virginia with a median time to termination of less than a year — most counties put the penalty on the table the moment children are temporarily removed from a home, in order to place “parents on notice from the beginning of the case,” according to the state child welfare agency’s policy handbook.

A sign points to the Department of Health and Human Resources, the agency that handles child welfare cases, in Romney, West Virginia.

Not every state moves so quickly: ProPublica and NBC News’ analysis found 16 states where the median time to termination is more than two years. Those longer cases, in some instances, can signal systems aren’t working as they should, reflecting bureaucratic dysfunction or what some child welfare officials describe as a pattern of giving parents “too many chances” that ultimately doesn’t help reduce termination rates, according to a 2021 report on state child welfare practices by the federal Department of Health and Human Services.

Still, longer timelines can also reflect a stronger focus on family reunification and a willingness to devote greater resources to meet that goal, child welfare experts say. New York and Illinois, for example, offer more robust social services, and they are also places with influential parent advocacy groups, said Christopher Wildeman, a child welfare expert and sociology professor at Duke University. (Wildeman is the director of the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect, which provided the data used in the ProPublica and NBC News analysis.)

In the wake of the opioid crisis, which has led to more kids being in foster care, Congress has tried to increase support for parents involved in the child welfare system. In 2018, it passed the Family First Prevention Services Act, approved with bipartisan support and signed by Trump. The law allows states to put federal funding previously restricted for foster care expenses toward mental health services, substance use treatment and parenting classes to help keep families together.

The Administration for Children and Families “is committed to focusing on prevention and early intervention so that families who come into contact with child welfare systems do not find themselves in the position of facing a termination of parental rights,” a spokesperson said.

But the legislation has strict requirements for which programs it will fund, and states have been slow to implement it. Eleven states are still waiting for their plans to be approved by the federal government, according to recent agency data, and six haven’t submitted plans at all. And some child welfare advocates have criticized the law’s focus on narrow initiatives like parenting classes, which they say fail to address poverty and the other root causes of neglect that prompt most child welfare cases.

“If I don’t have a house and I’m struggling, how are some parent education classes going to help?” said Christine James-Brown, the president and CEO of the Child Welfare League of America, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group.

West Virginia has drawn on the new federal funding but has spent only $125,000 since the summer of 2021, according to agency officials. The state is also trying to expand “family treatment courts,” designed to promote reunification rather than termination.

West Virginia’s senators, Joe Manchin, a Democrat, and Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican, told ProPublica and NBC News that they are committed to keeping families together when possible. Capito added that the news organizations’ findings are “concerning” and that her staff would look into those issues.

But when they were asked whether the state has adequate resources for family reunification — or whether the federal timeline for termination should be altered — neither senator responded directly.

Test Clean or Else

Some family advocates doubt that any new funding would have a significant impact on termination rates without a fundamental change in attitudes among local agencies and courts toward parents accused of child maltreatment, especially those struggling with substance use.

Judges have ultimate authority in such cases, but there is limited scrutiny of what happens in their courtrooms. In many states, including West Virginia, the public isn’t allowed to observe child welfare proceedings, and documents are typically kept under seal. Some judges order parents not to speak about their cases to anyone who isn’t involved, and if they disobey, it can be held against them.

What’s more, West Virginia judges often require parents to admit in court that they have a drug problem before they grant them an “improvement period,” said Joshua Edwards, a public defender in the state. If they refuse and the state proves to a judge that they used drugs, it becomes highly unlikely they will get their kids back, he said.

Jackie Snodgrass admitted in court to using drugs and neglecting her children’s education; she acknowledged in an interview that she regretted that her instances of meth use had put her family in jeopardy. But she never thought the mistake could lead to the end of her relationship with her daughters. After all, Snodgrass said, she had never hurt the girls, and according to court documents, they wanted to go home.

But the outcome hinged on whether the Snodgrasses complied with the services they were offered, including parenting classes and drug tests. And the government had little patience for mistakes or disagreements.

Snodgrass said she was required to call daily before 10 a.m. to find out whether she needed to be drug-screened. Once, around Thanksgiving, she said, she called a few minutes late, and the test was considered a failure.

Snodgrass goes through drawings left behind by her daughters.

From the start, Snodgrass and her husband were prohibited from seeing their daughters, even for supervised visits, because they couldn’t test clean consistently. She was testing positive for marijuana at the time, but she said she soon became so hopeless about the prospect of losing the girls forever that she used methamphetamine again to cope.

Snodgrass said she saw the phrase “termination of parental rights” in court papers for the first time early this year. Soon after, she said, a caseworker told her she would have to enter a long-term inpatient drug treatment program, probably for at least 45 days.

The family’s tree-trimming business didn’t have many clients yet, and Snodgrass, who was working as an assistant at a nursing home, was the primary earner. She said she feared they wouldn’t be able to pay their rent if she took an extended leave from work, and she told the caseworker that she was open to outpatient treatment, instead.

Her reluctance to enter an inpatient program proved critical, according to case documents. West Virginia is among 22 states with statutes saying that parents’ failure to comply with court-ordered rehabilitation or drug treatment plans, regardless of any evidence of harm to children, can itself be grounds for permanent termination of parental rights, according to a ProPublica and NBC News analysis of state laws.

Near the end of the case, Snodgrass said, her lawyer suggested that she divorce her husband because she was testing clean more often than he was. But the two were childhood sweethearts, and despite his drug use, he was a good father and her best friend, she said.

Still, she told the judge, “If I need to leave my husband, I’m willing to do that to bring my kids home.”

Her husband said in an interview that he was shocked to hear this in court but that he understood the position she was being put in. “I felt real low,” Wes Snodgrass said. “I felt like I didn’t have a family no more.”

It didn’t matter. In their case file, DHHR listed five general criteria for determining whether to recommend termination of parental rights to the court, including how long a child has been in foster care, whether a case involves serious abuse or abandonment by the parents or whether their rights have been severed before.

The couple met just one of the criteria: The agency concluded that there was “no reasonable likelihood” that the neglect allegations against them could be “substantially corrected in the near future,” citing their failure to comply with the court’s requirements within the previous five months.

Still denied any visits with the girls, they had no chance to hug them goodbye.

Rethinking the “Death Penalty” of Child Welfare

Fueled in part by the 2020 demonstrations for racial justice nationwide, family rights activists have made a renewed push to change the child welfare system — including the repeal of the Clinton law.

At the start of the new Congress, Cherfilus-McCormick, the representative from Florida, plans to introduce a bill to allow states to extend the timeline for termination and exempt parents who are actively participating in classes, treatment or other services; it would also encourage states to place more foster children with relatives instead of strangers. The bill was originally introduced last year by Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., but it failed to move forward, and Bass recently was sworn in as the new mayor of Los Angeles.

Cherfilus-McCormick and other Democratic lawmakers say they plan to make the issue a priority next year.

But that could be challenging given the changing balance of power in the House. Republicans, who will take the majority in January, have yet to co-sponsor any of the recent proposals to alter the federal timeline for termination.

Meanwhile, there has been growing support for alternative custody arrangements that don’t require termination of birth parents’ rights. In 2008, Congress passed a law allowing states to access federal funds to support guardianship by family members, and 40 states and the District of Columbia now have such programs.

And about half of states have laws that would allow parental rights to be reinstated or restored, although that is still rare and is often limited to cases in which the children lack permanent homes.

Support for such reforms varies widely among states, and the changes have yet to have a major impact on national adoption or reunification rates.

Washington, D.C.’s nonvoting delegate in the House of Representatives, Democrat Eleanor Holmes Norton, said the outsize impact of termination on low-income and Black families makes it especially urgent for Congress to fix the mistakes it made in the 1997 law. “It’s indefensible to have such short timelines,” said Norton, a longtime member of the Congressional Foster Care Caucus.

“The most important relationship in a family is the relationship between parents and children,” she said. “We should do everything we can to preserve that.”

Lost Time

“There’s, like, anger or something behind it,” Snodgrass said of the order that terminated her parental rights. “It seemed way too fast, but it also feels like years since I’ve seen my kids.”

Jackie Snodgrass said the gravity of what was happening in court didn’t hit her until the judge finally said the words: He was terminating her parental rights.

“My heart just fell to my knees,” she said. “It felt like I had just died. Like everything had been taken out of me.”

Snodgrass and her husband say they’ve been clean for several months, and they recently have had a new reason to hope. Her parents said state adoption officials told them that they will most likely be allowed to let the Snodgrasses see their children again, once the adoption is finalized.

But for now, they still aren’t supposed to have contact with their girls or even ask how they are doing. Since being separated, the older daughter has reached out to Snodgrass and they’ve talked by phone and instant messaging. Snodgrass is worried her daughters won’t think she cares about them if she keeps missing major life events like birthdays.

Still, she is more fortunate than many parents whose rights are terminated. When foster children are adopted by strangers, they can be cut off completely from their biological parents. Another mother in West Virginia who spoke with ProPublica and NBC News said she scours social media for photos of her daughters and stares at their adoptive home in a nearby town on Google Street View.

Snodgrass said that even if she is allowed back in her children’s lives, it still scares her that she has no control over their relationship, including any legal rights to make decisions about their medical treatment.

In between phone calls they’re not supposed to have, Snodgrass continues to get updates from her daughter’s blood sugar app. She said it provides a small comfort.

Hannah Rappleye, of NBC News, and Asia Fields, of ProPublica, contributed reporting. Alex Mierjeski and Mollie Simon, of ProPublica, contributed research.

The bitter cold temperatures could be dangerous, if not deadly to pets left outdoors.

The Pentagon is spending close to $2 billion on the north St. Louis project for the lesser-known member of the intelligence community, which largely deals with mapping and satellite imagery.

Catching Lucas Henson was no walk in the woods. Law enforcement's pursuit of the 36-year-old Missouri man was only just beginning when Henson, chased by Butler County Sheriff's Deputies, crashed a stolen 2007 Dodge pickup into woods near Mark Twain National Forest. The ensuing hours-long chase saw Henson set multiple forest fires in an attempt to throw federal and local authorities off his scent.

by Jake Pearson

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This story is a collaboration between New York magazine and ProPublica.

By the time Karl Ashanti neared his office in the New York City Law Department’s headquarters in March 2018, the police were shutting down Park Place. Ice had fallen from the buildings above, so an officer had cordoned off the area. Ashanti flashed his work ID and the cop let him through. Then, about two-thirds of the way down the block, he ran into a second officer. “Turn around now,” John Shapiro barked. “I said now.”

Ashanti stiffened. The two men were about the same size, each around 6 feet tall and 240 pounds. Shapiro was in his blue New York Police Department uniform. Ashanti, a city lawyer, wasn’t due in court that day and had dressed casually in dark slacks, a button-down, an overcoat and a winter hat. The two had never met before, but there was something about Shapiro’s brusque demeanor that Ashanti recognized.

For 11 years, Ashanti had defended NYPD officers against lawsuits alleging civil-rights violations in federal court. He was a senior litigator in a little-known Law Department unit that exclusively handles such cases, the Special Federal Litigation Division, known simply as Special Fed. As a Black man who’d grown up in Jamaica, Queens, Ashanti thought he brought valuable perspective to the work. He’d seen how Black people, and Black men in particular, could, through no fault of their own, be targeted by prejudiced men in uniform. Still, Ashanti took pride in his legal skills and had come to embrace the combative approach that Special Fed typically took in fighting claims of police abuse, even in the face of compelling evidence that police behavior violated the constitutional rights of the people they had sworn to protect.

On Park Place, Ashanti told Shapiro, who is white, that he was trying to get to his office. Shapiro insisted he go back the way he came. Ashanti moved between two parked cars to cross the street and Shapiro hustled to cut off his path, repeating his order. The two men faced each other in the middle of the road. Shapiro tapped Ashanti on his shoulder. Ashanti backpedaled and asked to speak to a supervisor. Shapiro took out his handcuffs. Within 90 seconds of their first encounter, the officer arrested the attorney.

Shapiro claimed in criminal filings that Ashanti resisted arrest and shoved him twice, so forcefully that Shapiro had to step back to catch his balance. The New York Post splashed the allegations in its pages, calling Ashanti a “livid lawyer.” It wasn’t true. Security-camera footage showed no shoving during the incident. As it unfolded, nine other people freely walked up and down Park Place. Court records revealed it wasn’t the first time Shapiro had been accused of abusing his power. By the time he detained Ashanti, the officer had already been named in three false-arrest lawsuits. (Two were settled, and one was dismissed.) Ashanti’s own unit had handled those cases.

Within days of the incident, the Law Department gave Ashanti an ultimatum: resign or be fired. After more than a decade defending the police, Ashanti was finding out what it was like on the other side of the law.

Footage of the incident between Ashanti and officer John Shapiro (New York Supreme Court)

On Oct. 29, 1984, when Ashanti was 11 years old, police officers in Morris Heights entered Eleanor Bumpurs’ apartment and killed her with a shotgun. Bumpurs was 66 and mentally ill. Her family had instructed her not to let strangers into her home, and when the police showed up to assist in her eviction that day, she lunged at them with a kitchen knife. Her death inflamed the city. In Ashanti’s neighborhood — a predominantly Black community of working-class Caribbean immigrants and city employees — the shooting entered a canon of police killings that, over decades, have shaped attitudes on race and the police. Ashanti remembers that this was about the time when his mother first gave him the Talk. “It’s not like she didn’t have respect for authority,” Ashanti says. “It was not that I should dislike the police. It was more like, ‘There are some police officers who will abuse their power, and unless you capitulate, things might escalate.’ She was like, ‘I want my son alive.’ She said that more than once to me.”

Not long after, three Black men whose car had broken down in Howard Beach were chased by a pack of white teenagers with tire irons and baseball bats. One of the men fleeing the mob was struck by a car and killed. Another was savagely beaten. For Ashanti, the takeaway was clear: Don’t ever ride your bike into Howard Beach. “It’s the ironic thing about growing up in New York City, which is such a quote, unquote liberal city,” he says. “You have these incidents of not just police but private racial violence.” Police racism was real, he thought, but cops didn’t have a monopoly on prejudice; it was simply everywhere.

In sixth grade, Ashanti did well on an exam given by Prep for Prep, a nonprofit group that sends promising students of color to elite, mostly white private schools. He attended Buckley, the tony all-boys academy on the Upper East Side, where he was a few years ahead of Donald Trump Jr., then high school at St. Paul’s, the exclusive New Hampshire boarding school.

One Friday during sophomore year, it was his turn to choose a film for movie night. Students normally picked comedies, but Ashanti went with “Colors,” the 1988 drama about Los Angeles cops patrolling gangland beats. One of the older boys “rolled his eyes about the selection and shit,” Ashanti says. “And then maybe like one or two other people joined in. A What the fuck is this? kind of thing. Just, like, a complete rejection of anything that had to do with the ghetto, with Black and Latino culture.” With him. “I just remember looking at them like: You fucking privileged assholes. Everything has to be your way all the fucking time.”

On several occasions, upperclassmen barged into his room in the middle of the night and pelted him with water balloons. He thought they were sending a message: “Here’s this motherfucker who won’t fall in line.” At 23, he legally changed his last name to Ashanti, shedding the birth name, Francis, that his enslaved African ancestors had been “branded” with. “I’m sure one of their goals was for one of their descendants to one day be free of that name,” he says. “I know that’s what it would be for me.”

Ashanti is impeccably credentialed — he went on to Stanford, where he was president of his all-Black fraternity, and then Georgetown Law — but when he returned to New York and entered the workforce, his trajectory slackened. At a succession of run-of-the-mill firms, Ashanti took cases involving businesses suing businesses, personal injury and insurance. The work could be challenging, but it didn’t satisfy his civic or lawyerly ambitions. A landlord and tenant arguing the terms of a 20-year lease? Boring. Cattle-call appearances in state courts before overworked judges? Uninspiring.

One morning on his way to the office, Ashanti says, an officer pulled him over for “erratic driving” and falsely cited him for having lapsed insurance. He was held for 12 hours. Another time, while applying to a new firm, his interviews seemed to be going well until he met with an elderly white partner. Ashanti later testified that the man said “something more malicious than ‘You’re articulate for a Negro.’” (The firm settled an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint. Ashanti said he received an apology that implied the partner was “like the grandpa you don’t want to bring out to the party.”)

Nine years passed in the lower tiers of corporate law. Ashanti wanted autonomy, and he wanted to conduct trials — maybe even change lanes to civil-rights law. From an early age, he’d been inspired by Thurgood Marshall. But he didn’t have a civil-rights background, and the longer he spent doing corporate law, the less possible switching tracks felt. He started talking with a recruiter, and when an opportunity arose at Special Fed, Ashanti listened with great interest.

The cases would be in the federal courts, where the smartest jurists operate, and he’d be handling them soup to nuts, appearing before judges and juries. And the subject matter was appealingly complex. The main statute governing Special Fed’s work, Section 1983, traces its roots to a Reconstruction-era bill known as the Ku Klux Klan Act that lets individuals sue local government officials for violations of their civil rights. It’s an extremely technical platform to litigate, with a century and a half of accumulated case law. “That’s the heart of our legal system: the relationship between government and individuals,” Ashanti says.

He would have preferred to do civil-rights work on behalf of plaintiffs, but the firms that handled such cases weren’t offering him a job. Plus, for a native New Yorker, joining the Law Department had a special attraction. “Representing the City of New York did fill me with a sense of pride,” he says.

The idea that he’d be arguing the side of the police just wasn’t much of a factor in his decision to join the division, he says. “I didn’t feel any kind of way about representing police officers and correctional officers because I always knew — I always knew — it was all about the work and the cases,” he says. “It’s always a case-by-case situation.”

Special Fed was created in 1998 by the administration of Rudy Giuliani to deal with a surge in lawsuits against police officers, jail guards and prosecutors. Its dozens of attorneys investigate citizens’ allegations of beatings, false arrests and other civil-rights abuses and decide whether to mount a defense or settle. Generally, they fight.

Many Special Fed veterans say the unit prizes winning at all costs, even when there is merit to a plaintiff’s case. Victory can still be had in making the process as difficult as possible for citizens — getting suits thrown out, abandoned or negotiated down to the smallest possible payout. The lawyers tend to see themselves as guardians of the public fisc, pitted against those who would drain the coffers: criminals looking for a payday, greedy lawyers, bleeding-heart juries. They litigate aggressively, sometimes drawing rebukes from judges for violating court rules, blowing deadlines and pressing the boundaries of professional conduct. Earlier this year, a judge dressed down a senior Special Fed lawyer for failing to obey court orders. “If I order something and you can’t do it, you can’t just blow it off,” the judge said. One plaintiff’s attorney told the New York Daily News, “They get away with things that no other litigant would ever get away with.” (A spokesman for the Law Department says, “We take our ethical responsibilities very seriously and have zero tolerance for misconduct that undermines our mission.”)

Sometimes even a victory at trial isn’t enough for Special Fed. In 2020, after defeating a Bronx man in an excessive-force case, the division sought sanctions against him and his legal team for bringing the suit in the first place. A federal judge wrote scathingly that the effort to penalize the plaintiff was “wildly inappropriate” because the man had had a reasonable case. More troubling, the judge wrote, was the chilling message that the episode sent to the law firms that do pro bono work for low-income people “with facially valid claims against powerful defendants.”

Ashanti believed he could be a more nuanced operator at Special Fed. Shortly before he started, in November 2006, plainclothes officers shot 50 bullets at a car driven by a Black 23-year-old named Sean Bell in the early hours of his wedding day. It was the city’s most incendiary police killing in years, and Ashanti felt it personally — Bell was from his neighborhood. “Sean Bell was me,” he says. He decided that at his new job, the Bell case would serve as his moral barometer. The family would inevitably file a civil suit against the police; would Special Fed settle it judiciously, or would the unit reflexively fight to minimize the payout? “That was the biggest question to me: Are we going to defend the indefensible?” Ashanti says.

Joseph Guzman, who was wounded in the police shooting that killed Sean Bell, speaks outside the Queens Criminal Court in March 2007. (Michael Nagle/Getty Images)

He showed up to his first day of work in March 2007. The third floor of the New York City Law Department was like a relic of the drab municipal offices of the 1970s, with paralegals and claims specialists sitting in cubicles in the middle of the floor and attorneys occupying small windowless offices. Conference rooms had removable walls so they could double in size when teams of litigators fielded especially big cases. Armed NYPD officers — liaisons between Special Fed and its police clients — walked the halls.

Ashanti handled about 40 lawsuits a year, and he found that few fit his Sean Bell binary. Most presented as murky, with imperfect evidence and plaintiffs who might have been breaking the law, introducing questions of credibility and sympathy with juries. One of his first assignments involved a class-action suit alleging that Rikers Island jailers were unconstitutionally strip-searching female inmates and conducting nonconsensual gynecological exams. Ashanti was one of eight or so lawyers on the Special Fed team. Questions about constitutional violations and public accountability receded as the day-to-day work ground on with arguments over records, process and liability. (The suit was settled years later for $33 million.)

Like most in his profession, Ashanti believed in some core tenets about representation: Attorneys are not their clients, and our adversarial system demands that each side have zealous counsel. But at Special Fed, almost from the start, he struggled to moderate that zeal. In a performance review, a superior noted that “Karl’s passion for an issue many times comes across as temper and this detracts from his professional demeanor.” Another report in 2011 chided Ashanti for getting into two “public confrontations,” one with a colleague and another with opposing counsel. At the same time, his bosses — all but a few of whom were white — were thrilled with the results he was getting. They praised him for settling cases for even less money than they had authorized.

The lawyers who stood across the courtroom from Ashanti knew all about zealous advocacy, and they saw his behavior as needlessly hostile. Several felt he embodied what was wrong with Special Fed — a relentless sparring that obscured what was really at stake in the cases: civil rights and public accountability. Rose Weber, a longtime civil-rights lawyer who had worked at Special Fed in its early days, was especially disturbed by Ashanti’s tactics in a 2010 excessive-force case. Her client claimed to have been slammed to the ground by a plainclothes officer, rupturing discs in his back. In a motion, Ashanti wrote dismissively that the alleged abuse was “of minor importance.” The judge called the argument “as groundless as it is troubling.” Weber, who would go on to lose the case, spoke to other plaintiffs’ attorneys about Ashanti and collected a handful of confrontational anecdotes in a folder on her computer. Compared to that of other Special Fed lawyers, she says, Ashanti’s approach “wasn’t even beyond the realm. It was a realm of its own.”

Another frequent opponent, Robert Quackenbush, had a more civil relationship with Ashanti. In a case with video evidence showing that police had lied in sworn testimony, he got into a dispute with Ashanti about compensation for his client, who had been punched and pepper-sprayed. Quackenbush cited two precedents that he believed supported his reasoning. Ashanti wrote, “I’ve read those cases and disagree but if we agreed about everything we wouldn’t be adversaries. Be well.”

“The most charitable assessment is that he was extremely combative,” Quackenbush says. “People wanted to attribute his litigation style to his soul or something. I don’t personally do that. He was a Black man working for the City of New York on police cases at a time judges were finding the police were discriminating against Black people. That had to have been an impossible job and an impossible situation.”

Ashanti was one of just a handful of Black lawyers within Special Fed. He said in a 2020 deposition that he detected a racial dimension to the way he was perceived by some opposing counsel. “If I push back on any issue, they’re like: ‘You don’t have to get so worked up. You don’t have to get so upset.’ And I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’” he said. “There’s no use of the N-word, but it was the underlying idea of an overly-aggressive-Black-man kind of thing.”

On a separate occasion, Ashanti took the testimony of a witness at an opposing attorney’s home office. It grew so contentious the other lawyer, Carmen Giordano, called 911. Giordano told a judge in the case that Ashanti “refused to stop yelling in a startling and menacing manner” and wouldn’t leave when asked. Ashanti denied that; he told the judge he had had a “momentary lapse in professionalism” that didn’t merit a “call for a police presence to put me back ‘in my place.’” He added that the idea that he was “threatening” was “predicated on an expectation of violence due to racist notions about Black men having an inherent propensity to commit violence, rather than the actual behavior of the individual.” His supervisor took his side.

Within Special Fed, Ashanti talked with Black colleagues about the difficulties of advancement. “It was kind of harder to build a career as a Black attorney than as a white attorney,” he said in the 2020 deposition. But he also put that observation in context: “It’s not specific to the Law Department,” he said. “It’s just society. The Law Department is a microcosm of society.”

When it came to his own cases, Ashanti says, he never felt angst. He could reconcile using his legal skills in defense of the police while at the same time recognizing that Black people were at greater risk of police maltreatment. Besides, the job provided him with a stable, middle-class life. He got married, and he and his wife, Jovanna, moved to Staten Island, where they would go on to raise two sons and be active in their church as born-again Christians.

Ashanti compartmentalized. “Professionals do professional shit,” he says. “Excuse my language. But, like, if you’re a basketball player, you fucking play basketball. You do what you do, and I am a lawyer, so I lawyered up. I did my work.”

Whom exactly does the city lawyer represent? The straightforward answer is the city, of course. But the issue gets more complicated if you consider whether New York is its citizens or its employees. When residents file lawsuits against the police, the text of the municipal charter turns into something of a paradox. It requires the Law Department to represent “the city and every agency thereof” but also says it should “maintain, defend and establish” the interests of “the people thereof.” Is it acting in anyone’s best interest to get a civil case against a police officer thrown out if it enables the officer to cross the line again?

For years, Special Fed took the narrow view — that its lawyers represented the police and that its chief obligation was to minimize payouts over officers’ misconduct. That was especially true at the end of the Bloomberg administration, which clamped down by designating more cases “No Pay” and forcing the Special Fed lawyers who fielded them to go to trial.

In 2014, however, Bill de Blasio was sworn in as mayor after campaigning on police reform, and it looked as though his administration would answer the question of representation in a dramatically more expansive way. De Blasio’s pick to lead the Law Department was Zachary Carter, an esteemed Black lawyer who had served as a U.S. attorney and federal judge. Carter began telling city lawyers that they represented, in some fashion, the names on both sides of the v. in a lawsuit’s title. And he unveiled a new doctrine, “Justice in Our Work,” that he hoped would change the culture inside the agency.

Curiously, Carter wanted the defense lawyers to act more like prosecutors — but only in the sense that they should exercise a degree of forbearance. Defense lawyers must argue every point in service of their clients, but the Supreme Court has held that prosecutors have an ethical obligation to deliver not just convictions but justice. They are meant to drop cases and withdraw charges when it seems like “the right thing” to do. In New York, that is the title of the District Attorneys Association’s ethics handbook, which opens by telling members there is a higher civic duty that goes beyond defeating the opposition. “Unlike other lawyers,” it reads, “the client we represent is the public, whose interests are not necessarily served by winning every case.”

Zachary Carter (Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images)

“Justice in Our Work” was a radical approach to city lawyering. It challenged Special Fed’s standard playbook: seeking dismissal, fighting disclosure, putting the screws to plaintiffs during depositions. In a memo to senior staff, Carter said he was not asking city attorneys to “turn a blind eye to clearly established law or fail to aggressively litigate when faced with sympathetic opposing parties.” Instead, he argued, they should use those analyses as starting points before settling on an outcome that would advance the “nebulous question” of what it means to act in the city’s best interest. “Failing to identify the just option among alternative legal positions is a failure to counsel the City in a way that allows it to fulfill one of its most fundamental obligations: to govern in a just manner,” he wrote.

For a while, the new doctrine had a big impact. In January 2014, the administration ended the city’s efforts to defend its stop-and-frisk program. Later that year, Carter directed Special Fed to settle its highest-profile civil-rights case — brought by five Black and Hispanic men wrongly convicted of raping and beating a woman in Central Park in 1989 — for $41 million. But “Justice in Our Work” was not to last.

That December, two police officers were assassinated while sitting in their patrol car, destroying what little remained of de Blasio’s relationship with the NYPD and its unions. Then Special Fed settled a case involving a Brooklyn man who was shot by police after he brandished a machete. The man had a weak claim, but city lawyers agreed to pay $5,000 to erase the chance that it could be heard by a sympathetic jury. The Post put it on the front page under the headline “Ax & You Shall Receive.” Then-Commissioner Bill Bratton condemned the settlement, saying it was “outrageous” that the agency “is continuing to not support the men and women in this department.” The blowback was so hot that even de  Blasio chimed in to say the payment was “wrong.”

In a memo to union leaders, one of the mayor’s top aides clarified the administration’s police litigation policy, writing that the Law Department would “enhance the representation of police officers” sued while on the job. The NYPD created a new legal team to augment the Law Department. And Carter appointed a new head of Special Fed, Patricia Miller, who championed the “No Pay” approach. She is still in charge. This past March, during an interview on John Catsimatidis’ talk-radio show, a host asked Miller how hard it was to combat the media’s demonization of “the men and women in blue.” She responded: “I think you hit on a good point. We provide a voice for police officers.”

Joel Berger, a civil-rights lawyer who served as a Law Department executive during the administration of David Dinkins, says there is a “buddy-buddy relationship between the NYPD and the Law Department that would’ve been unheard of in my day.” From the perspective of the civil-rights bar, Special Fed has for years put the interests of the police above those of its primary client: the city and the people who live there.

A few years after Ashanti joined Special Fed, the city resolved a lawsuit brought by Sean Bell’s fiancée and others for $7 million. Ashanti thought it showed that his employer had a limit — that it would pay up in egregious cases — and that the settlement represented something like justice. “The cop isn’t going to sit down in a room and apologize to you,” he says. “In our civil system, it is money.”

How much Special Fed agrees to pay plaintiffs is decided by a process known as “seeking authority.” In memos, lawyers present their bosses with the facts of their cases, including confidential details like internal NYPD disciplinary records, and request an amount they think will put the matter to rest. Ashanti says he came up with figures by weighing several factors: a fiscal responsibility to protect the Treasury, how likely he was to win and precedents, adding more money when “the actions of the police were egregious or there was more of an injustice.”

In general, Ashanti considered himself a force for good within a flawed system — an arbiter of civil-side justice, denying awards to those who would wrongly accuse good cops of bad deeds while working behind closed doors to get deserving clients justly compensated. But if that was true, it was well disguised from the New Yorkers who alleged their civil rights had been violated.

In 2015, Ashanti was assigned a lawsuit against four officers accused of false arrest, excessive force and other offenses. A 21-year-old man named Allen Brown had been a passenger in a car driven by a friend of a friend when police in an unmarked vehicle attempted to pull them over. To Brown’s shock, the driver sped off, then left the car and fled by foot. Brown, who is Black, panicked. He ran, too, hiding in the basement stairwell of a nearby house. A resident called 911. Brown later testified that even though he emerged with his hands raised, the cops beat him up, kicking him in the face multiple times while he was handcuffed.

The officers denied this, but it wasn’t the first time they had been accused of misconduct. Ashanti’s unit had represented each of the officers in at least one prior case. One had already been named in three. Collectively, the cases cost taxpayers $158,000.

Ashanti fought Brown vigorously. In the courtroom one day, he seemed to suggest that because Brown ran, he brought whatever happened upon himself. “Any force that was used was the product of the fact that not only did he flee from the vehicle but then trespassed on someone else’s property,” Ashanti said.

Taken aback, Judge Ramon Reyes Jr. told Ashanti he thought he’d just “made a misstatement.”

“Which is?” Ashanti asked.

“That the force used was related to the fact that he was trespassing,” Reyes said. Ashanti started to talk, but the judge cut him off: “You can’t use force. Period.”

Ashanti said he hadn’t meant to imply that. They went back and forth, and Reyes got exasperated. “Lower your voice,” he told Ashanti. “You think because you raise your voice, your arguments are more persuasive. They’re not.”

Ashanti offered Brown $20,000 to settle. But Brown’s lawyers soon discovered that Ashanti hadn’t provided them with a key Internal Affairs report. A judge sanctioned the city for the failure. Ashanti protested that an “inadvertent clerical error” was to blame, but another judge upheld the penalty. The case, which Brown once offered to resolve for $200,000, eventually settled for $325,000.

Brown is now 29. He says the purpose of his lawsuit was mostly to get some accountability for what had happened to him. He still feels particular resentment toward Ashanti, whose full-throated lawyering had made Brown seem like a liar. “It was the undermining — and the sort of sweeping under the rug — of what had happened to me,” Brown says. “I just feel it was very unfair.” He adds, “I don’t know if this is even the job to be empathetic, but he definitely lacked any sort of empathy or any level of understanding.”

When told how Brown feels, Ashanti is unmoved. “How can I put this?” he says. “Civil rights can be violated and that person can still be a knucklehead, you know what I’m saying?” He claims that back at Special Fed, he had tried to advocate for Brown. “He wasn’t there, wasn’t privy to the conversations where I was trying to get authority for the case because I thought his civil rights were violated.” Ashanti says. “Mature people know these things, right? I’m not going to say, ‘Yeah, you’re right — these cops really fucked him up badly. How much do you want, Allen?’ Like, come on. Come the fuck on — excuse my language. Like, that’s not how things are done.”

Ashanti sees the Brown case as an instance of his furthering the cause of justice, not the opposite. “It’s why you need people like me in those positions,” he says. “That’s what a fucking idiot like him is too stupid to see. You need someone like me in those positions versus a white guy who doesn’t give a fuck about you. Any intelligent person can see that, who’s actually mature enough to understand that two things can be true that are seemingly — seemingly — contradictory.”

Not everyone at Special Fed could handle the dissonance. At the same time that he was working the Brown case, Ashanti was asked to mentor a new hire named David Ferrari, who was 25 and fresh out of law school. Like Ashanti eight years earlier, he was immediately assigned complex litigation. Unlike Ashanti, he revolted.

Ferrari was besieged with cases, many of which were frivolous on their face. But he also found that in many of his assignments, officers accused of brutality or other civil-rights violations refused to tell him clearly what had happened. Interviewing cops in his third-floor office, he’d try and fail to get them to go beyond blanket statements like “I was forced to administer a blow.” Ferrari would tell his bosses that it was impossible for him to determine if the plaintiffs’ cases had merit. Ferrari recalls, “The response was: ‘What are you talking about? He told you everything you need to know to make the case.’”

Ferrari turned to Ashanti. Ferrari remembers him saying: “I hear you. I empathize. We’re all very stressed. We just have to keep our head down and keep pushing.” The job ate at Ferrari so much that his health suffered. “Doing the job well was different than doing the right thing,” he says. “Certainly, nobody encouraged me to do something unethical. The culture, the atmosphere, the need to not settle these cases lends itself to a toxic environment.” Ferrari quit after about two years, making sure the office knew he had nothing else lined up. “When I left, I had at least six different attorneys come to my office,” he says. “‘How did you escape this place? How do I get out of here?’ That’s when I felt really vindicated.”

Ferrari says that when he heard about Ashanti’s arrest on Park Place in March 2018, he felt nothing but sympathy. “The job was not easy on him either,” he says. “My intuition was that as overworked as I was, I know he was more overworked. I knew that whatever cases that had the gray area we were struggling with, those were chosen for me because a first-year could handle it. His were a lot more complex.”

Allen Brown’s reaction to Ashanti’s arrest is less generous. Ashanti, he says, is “getting a taste of his own medicine.”

After his altercation with Officer Shapiro on the icy street, Ashanti spent 14 hours in custody. The experience was surreal. “The main component of my job was defending police officers in similar situations who are sometimes guilty of falsely arresting people. And this was one of them,” he says. “That irony hit me immediately.”

His bosses suspended him while they investigated. Ashanti soon learned the breadth of Shapiro’s allegations — that not only had he supposedly shoved the officer but he’d also gone on a tirade, claiming that he’d be “contacting the media” and could no longer “work for this police department or this city anymore.” Ashanti denied saying those things. But then the Post published its “livid lawyer” article.

Ashanti’s superiors did not see his arrest as an isolated incident. A year earlier, he had been brought before top management for violating city rules. Ashanti had represented his wife in small-claims court in a dispute with her former employer, a nonprofit wholly owned by a city agency — a clear conflict of interest. (He was later fined $8,500.) To the Law Department, Ashanti’s use of his city ID to enter a roped-off block was further proof that he felt the rules didn’t apply to him.

With his job in the balance, Ashanti got on the phone with Muriel Goode-Trufant, the agency’s managing attorney. “I knew it was a done deal,” he later testified, “but I expressed my disappointment in her as a Black woman to basically take the racist actions of this police officer that led to my false arrest and then to compound the problem, in order to appease the NYPD, by making me, in essence, a sacrificial lamb. I don’t think I used that term, sacrificial lamb, but that was it in sum and substance. So she was putting the interest of appearances, or the relationship between the Law Department and the NYPD, over what’s right and what’s just.” It was the same argument that Ashanti’s opponents had been leveling against Special Fed for years.

The conversation didn’t help. Within a week of his arrest, Ashanti was told he could resign or be fired. “Despite our frustrations with Karl, it did not mean that we disliked him, so we gave him the opportunity to make the choice,” Goode-Trufant said in a deposition.

Over the next few months, prosecutors withdrew all the charges against Ashanti except for one count of harassment, which is punishable by up to 15 days in jail. That August, wearing a light-blue dress shirt and blue tie with white dots, Ashanti walked into a Manhattan courtroom for a bench trial. He sat at a table as his lawyer walked Shapiro through a crucial 12 seconds of surveillance footage, which doesn’t show any obvious shoves or step-backs.

The judge issued her decision: not guilty. “You know how we always complain we’re under surveillance everywhere?” says Ashanti’s wife, Jovanna. “Thank God for that. That’s what saved Karl.”

After his acquittal, Ashanti turned to reputation repair, hiring a company to scrub his Google results and enlisting members of his church to lobby the Post until the paper removed the story about his arrest from its website. He got a job at a firm representing plaintiffs in civil-rights litigation, advocating for them against the city. He was finally realizing his original ambitions of using the law to help others. “It just took a long, long time — a long, circuitous route to get here,” he says.

Ashanti also sued the city and Shapiro for damages. (The officer has since drawn yet another lawsuit, his fifth in less than a decade. A Canal Street vendor claims that Shapiro yanked her arm so forcefully while arresting her that he broke her shoulder bone, an injury that required a plate and screws to repair. The city denies that claim and is defending him in state court.) Shapiro declined to comment. In a statement, a police spokesperson also declined to comment and denied, generally, that the police have “undue influence on the Special Fed and its work,” saying any claim that it does “is outrageous and inaccurate.”

Ashanti v. The City of New York is ongoing. The city says it’s treating the case as it would any other. “While we work to vigorously protect the interests of the city in every case, we are always mindful that opposing parties are also citizens who should be treated with respect and whose claims should be evaluated fairly,” a spokesman says. “We have upheld all of these values in defending against the meritless case brought by Mr. Ashanti.”

As the case drags on, Ashanti sometimes sounds a bit like Brown. He complains that the city lawyer assigned to his lawsuit is treating it like a “No Pay” case and “fighting tooth and nail against me.” There is a deep sense of outrage, even hurt, in his voice. And yet when I asked him recently about the parallel to Brown, and whether his experience has made him rethink his own hardball tactics at Special Fed, he was unequivocal. “I did my job the right way,” he says.

Over a decade at Special Fed, Ashanti defended the police and jail guards in more than 300 cases accusing them of violating New Yorkers’ constitutional rights. “I didn’t become a Law Department counsel because I was afraid of how people would view me or I was afraid my liberal card would get snatched away, or my Black card,” he says. “I know who I  am. I know what I’ve been through. I know what I believe.”

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