New York City paid out $206 million last year to settle cases involving police and prosecutorial misconduct, including decades-old wrongful convictions.
The amount was the most since at least 2018, and it accounts for 27 percent of the $756 million the city has paid in such lawsuits over the past seven years, according to data released on Tuesday by the Legal Aid Society.
Much of the continuing financial burden stems from dubious practices from the 1990s, when the city was ridden with crime and police investigators and prosecutors were under pressure to get convictions at any cost.
The city settled 953 cases in 2024, and the highest payouts included five settlements that cost at least $15 million each. Two were from the wrongful convictions of James Irons and Thomas Malik, who in 1995 were charged with the murder of a subway clerk.
After spending three decades behind bars, Mr. Irons and Mr. Malik were exonerated by a judge who found that the police had elicited false confessions from them. Both were awarded about $16.3 million last year.
The Police Department noted that around 64 percent of the cases settled in 2024 were wrongful convictions and at least half of those were around two decades old.
Kalle Condliffe, a supervising lawyer at Legal Aid, said many of the settlements were the result of cases that occurred before 2019, when New York passed a law that transformed the way that trials were conducted. Under that law, the state began requiring district attorneys to turn over evidence to defense lawyers within 90 days for misdemeanors and six months for felonies.
In January, Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, proposed changes to that law. The legislation, she said, had allowed defense lawyers to retroactively challenge prosecutors’ compliance on rules that could lead to the dismissal of cases on what she said were technicalities.
Ms. Condliffe said any rollbacks to the law would lead to police and prosecutorial misconduct, more wrongful convictions and costlier settlements.
“It’s incredible that in a moment where we are seeing some of the largest payouts in our state’s history, we’re also at a moment where the governor is trying to dismantle this really important law,” Ms. Condliffe said.
The amount of money that the city has spent on misconduct settlements has fluctuated over the past several years. In 2018, the city paid about $76.5 million to settle 1,577 cases, according to Legal Aid. Three years later, the amount rose to $88.2 million for 762 settlements.
By 2022, the cost of police misconduct settlements jumped to $135.4 million. Six suits that amounted to about $73 million — including one for Muhammad A. Aziz, whose conviction in the assassination of Malcolm X was thrown out after he spent two decades in prison — accounted for much of the increase.
Some of the other top payouts last year were for Gary Johnson and Rohan Bolt, who were convicted in the 1996 killing of a store owner in Queens and of an off-duty police officer who was providing security.
Melinda Katz, the Queens district attorney, tossed out their convictions in 2021, citing prosecutorial misconduct. Mr. Bolt received $15.2 million last year; Mr. Johnson received $15 million. (George Bell, among the men charged with the crimes, received $17.5 million in 2023, the most the city has ever awarded.)
In another case, Norberto Peets, who was wrongfully convicted of attempted murder in a Bronx shooting in 1999, was awarded $14.75 million. The officers were accused of lying about what had occurred, and Mr. Peets was exonerated in 2003 after spending nearly a quarter-century in prison.
“We’re still seeing the results of the old way, the old culture of hiding evidence,” Ms. Condliffe said. “We cannot go back to that.”
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