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CCNY'S INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER   MAY 2000 VOLUME 2, NUMBER 5

NYC News. . .

• Legal Aid Attorneys Oppose Police Abuse
• Not In My Backyard. . .

Legal Aid Attorneys Oppose Police Abuse

In response to “Operation Condor,” the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys has reaffirmed its commitment to provide each client with high-quality legal representation, aggressive case investigation and motion practice, and appropriate legal action against, and publicity about, the NYPD’s pattern of false arrests and detention.

In response to what the ALAA calls “systemic police abuse that plagues New York City,” they have called for far-reaching reforms, including:

• The immediate abolition of the Street Crime Unit, “Operation Condor,” and all similar “search and destroy,” body count, and arrest quota units.
• Dismissal of Police Commissioner Howard Safir.
• Permanent federal monitoring of the NYPD, and implementation of such long overdue reforms as police residency requirements and abolition of the 48-hour rule.
• Federal prosecution of the police officers responsible for the murders of Amadou Diallo, Malcolm Ferguson, Patrick Dorismond, and others.
• Prosecution of each City official who illegally released sealed records of former Legal Aid Society client Patrick Dorismond.
• Establishment of an independent state agency to aggressively prosecute future police violence and abuse.
• An end to the “War on Drugs,” including the Draconian Rockefeller sentencing laws, which generates violent crime, police brutality, and mass criminalization, particularly against communities of color.

Not In My Backyard. . .

Two lesbian medical students have appealed their lawsuit against Yeshiva University and its Albert Einstein Medical College to gain school-subsidized student housing. Yeshiva offers graduate housing only to legally married students, a qualification same-gender couples can’t currently meet.

The night before the appeals hearing, students protested Yeshiva’s policy by spending the night in tents outside the campus housing site. Sara Levin and Maggie Jones, the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, joined the “shelter strikers” along with members of the campus lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender group, which is also a plaintiff.

The ACLU says this is the first lawsuit in the U.S. to seek equal campus housing opportunities for gay and lesbian students and their same-gender partners and charges that the policy violates the New York State Human Rights Law by discriminating based on marital status and sexual orientation.

Yeshiva claims that it treats unmarried heterosexual couples and same-gender couples the same so there is no discrimination.

The judge who dismissed the lawsuit last year noted that New York’s highest court had consistently rejected extending marital rights to gay and lesbian couples, so change would have to come from the state legislature rather than his court. He also felt that Yeshiva could legally favor married couples for its own subsidized housing.

In 1989, the Einstein College student/faculty senate passed a resolution calling for equal housing and other benefits for gay and lesbian couples, but Yeshiva University president Rabbi Norman Lamm blocked the initiative, saying, “Under no circumstances can Judaism permit homosexuality to become respectable.” Yeshiva is a secular institution now, with the exception of its rabbinical school.

New York City’s only other universities offering married student housing, Columbia University and the CUNY Graduate Center, both treat domestic partners the same as married couples, regardless of gender.

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