East End towns and villages have settled a lawsuit brought last month by the Suffolk County Legal Aid Society over the towns’ justice court facilities.
The Legal Aid Society, complaining about court facilities in the towns of Riverhead, Southold and Southampton and the villages of Southampton and Sag Harbor, had asked a State Supreme Court judge to order to those towns and villages to conduct criminal arraignments in Suffolk County District Court. Existing facilities don’t provide confidential meeting space for attorneys to confer with defendants in custody, compelling defendants to converse with their lawyers in the presence of law enforcement personnel. That arrangement violates the criminal defendant’s constitutional rights, the suit alleges.
Under a settlement that’s already been signed and was filed yesterday in state court, the towns of Riverhead and Southold have agreed to undertake some construction work, according to Legal Aid Society attorney Sabato Caponi, who filed the action Feb. 4.
Riverhead has agreed to build a partition in a small conference room adjacent to the courtroom so that prisoners can be secured in separate area, protecting the safety of attorneys, Caponi said.
Southold is also creating an attorney-client conference space in an existing room. The town has to knock through a wall to make a door so it’s accessible from the exterior, Caponi said, and also build a partition to make it safer. The work appeared to have already begun yesterday.
Riverhead and Southold are the only two municipalities that have to do any construction under the terms of the settlement, which calls for all work to be completed by April 30, he said.
