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NYC prisoner's suit led to jail reform but left him little, cost taxpayers

Graham Rayman, New York Daily News on

Published in News & Features

NEW YORK — In August 2011, Mark Nunez typed out a lawsuit against the city, a year after a team of jail officers on Rikers Island beat him with a radio, dragged him down a hallway and stripped him naked.

In an upstate prison at the time, Nunez was not a lawyer, and relied on advice from two savvy older inmates who worked in the law library to write the nine-page complaint.

About a year later, his suit was combined into a closely watched class action case alleging the city has failed to address violence and use of force in the jails.

The case became known as Nunez vs. the City of New York. Thirteen years later, the case has made, at least in criminal justice circles, the name Nunez a household word.

Through all that time, Nunez remained quiet. But in his first interview, he spoke with a Daily News reporter about his life and views of the case that carries his name.

”I didn’t think it would be that impactful because these kinds of things happen every day on Rikers,” Nunez, 41, told The News. “So I was just like, boom, you did this to me? I’m gonna make sure I get paid for this. That was my mentality.”

Now a little more reflective, Nunez talked in a public library near his home as his 5-year-old twin sons, Milo and Kash, played on a computer. His third son, Zion, 9, was at camp.

One of the ironies of Nunez’s story, and something that still rankles him, is he received just $75,000 in a 2015 settlement. Meanwhile, the case has become its own industry. The cost to taxpayers of the federal monitor alone has been $26.1 million over eight years, the city said Thursday.

And even as his name has become a symbol of jail reform, Nunez had to file for bankruptcy in 2024, records show.

Nunez’s case tells two stories: the journey of the man himself and the legal wrangling around him.

“The people at the heart of these cases take on this almost mythical status,” said Hernandez Stroud, senior fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice. “His story highlights some of the very real tensions that exist in people’s quest for justice given the vehicles that are available.”

For their part, Nunez case lawyers Mary Lynne Werlwas of Legal Aid and Jonathan Abady of Emery Celli lauded his “courage and skill in overcoming the enormous obstacles to pro se plaintiffs.”

“The abuse he suffered was emblematic of the pattern of brutality in the jails,” they said. Former Correction Commissioner Vincent Schiraldi called Nunez’s contribution “among the most consequential acts of jail reform in the city’s history.”

Mark Nunez grew up in the Bronx near Yankee Stadium. His mom was a foster care social worker, his dad, a building superintendent.

He first landed on Rikers Island at age 15 for robbery. There, he remembers a fight with another teen over the phone. He was brought to a room by a 300-pound officer who slapped him and threatened him, using the N-word, he recounted.

“I weighed like 180, that was the first time I had been treated like that,” he told The News. “He goes, ‘If you want to make a report, it’s not going to go well for you.’”

At 26, he was busted for several bank robberies after cops put out his picture. He said he remembers his mother telling him, “You know, there’s someone on the TV that looks just like you’.”

“I didn’t have to turn to the streets. It was a choice,” he said. “Back then I used to live life with no control. Now I have more control.”

On March 4, 2010, he was waiting in the Robert N. Davoren Center to go upstate to start his sentence.

An uproar started after a rookie correction officer, irked at food left in the pantry from the previous night, damaged the unit’s phones, he alleged. At some point she hit her personal body alarm summoning the “turtles” — an emergency squad in helmets and body armor.

Nunez said the young officer told him she hit her button by accident. When someone mouthed off at the captain, he used pepper spray on the group, Nunez said. He then found himself on the floor being hit by the radio.

“He was just banging me, banging me in my head with the walkie-talkie,” he told The News.

Nunez said he was then dragged down a long hallway out of the tier to intake in front of a group of New York City Department of Correction supervisors in white shirts and suits.

“They were all lined up, looking at us and laughing,” he said. “I was stripped butt naked, they had all these big officers saying, ‘We’ll kill you right here.’”

Nunez says he couldn’t feel his right hand for two months from the cuffs. The next morning he was bused to Downstate Correctional Facility in Fishkill.

“They put a notation on my paperwork that said I like to assault officers. When I got to the state, they put me in a room with a whole bunch of officers and [they] said, ‘We ain’t gonna have no issue out of you, or we’ll f–k you up’.”

From Downstate, Nunez was shipped 280 miles to Gouverneur Correctional Facility, by the Canada border. He decided to sue over the Rikers beating.

“It was the humiliation I went through for no reason,” he said. “I wasn’t a threat to the officers.”

When his family had trouble finding a lawyer to take the case, he decided to file the case himself. Under 28 USC 1654, federal law allows individuals to file lawsuits “pro se,” Latin for “one’s own behalf.” Roughly 1,400 people a year file pro se lawsuits in New York’s Southern District, most are dismissed.

He wrote out his story and made the law library part of his prison routine. There, Nunez met Harry Elmore, then 60, who had by then been in prison for 33 years for the 1977 murder in Harlem of a woman while he was on prison furlough.

Elmore worked in the library and shared advice and case citations with other inmates. “He taught me the concept of ‘fruit from the poisonous tree.’ He sent a lot of guys home. I typed it up in the law library, and he really souped it up,” Nunez said. “He told me, ‘That complaint is so bad, be careful. Put it in after you go home.’”

Elmore was paroled in 2016, records show. Nunez said he saw him in the Bronx some time after that.

“He said, ‘I don’t have much time to live so they let [me] out,’” Nunez says. “He was helping me on another case. When I went later to visit him at his shelter, they told me he had died.”

A few months before his release, Nunez was moved to Queensboro Correctional Facility in Long Island City. For final revisions, Nunez turned to another inmate and self-styled “litigation specialist,” Anthony Anderson, now 58.

“I paid him like $300, but he said there’s not much I can do with it, it was already good,” Nunez said.

Anderson, now a maintenance technician in Delaware, recalled Nunez coming to him, telling The News: “I helped a lot of guys, I did criminal, civil, divorces, family court. It was common for guys to have something bad happen on Rikers.”

 

Nunez then mailed the complaint via the prison post office to the pro se clerk in Federal District Court in Manhattan. The clerk stamped it “received” on Aug. 18, 2011, at 3:11 p.m., records show.

“I was just released from state correction and I am job searching,” he wrote in the declaration seeking to represent himself.

After emerging from prison, Nunez says at some point he encountered Jonathan Chasan, then the director of Legal Aid’s Prisoners Rights Project, who was working with Emery Celli and a second firm Ropes and Gray on the broader class action.

Nunez said he agreed to add his case to that of 10 others who had also suffered serious injuries from officers. On May 24, 2012, the amended complaint was filed — from his modest nine pages it swelled to 89 pages, and where there were no lawyers now there were nine named attorneys.

The expanded suit sought, it said, to “end the pattern and practice of unnecessary and excessive force inflicted upon inmates of New York City jails … knowingly permitted and encouraged by department supervisors.”

The case inspired the Obama era Justice Department to accelerate an investigation into Rikers and triggered an explosion of media interest in the jails.

But Nunez had other concerns, like finding work and rebuilding his life after prison. He says he was determined to avoid another stint behind bars and adapted the term “changed man” into his email address.

He found jobs with movie and TV production companies and labored for years on sets for shows like “Law & Order” and streaming series like “The Plot Against America.”

“I was just trying to survive,” he says. “Life was hitting.”

In 2014, Nunez found himself in a confrontation in Bronx Criminal Court, according to a lawsuit he later filed, once again pro se.

He alleged he and his girlfriend were in line to deal with a summons for walking their dog without a leash. A court officer ordered him to the back of the line, “else you ain’t gonna see no f—–g judge today!”

Nunez was tackled and jailed for seven days, he alleged.

In the resulting lawsuit, Nunez listed himself as a “production assistant and truck driver” who made $26,000 in the previous year. He wrote that his checking account had a zero balance and he had a 2-year-old son, Zion.

“I’m pro se and don’t have the resources to file in the required time,” he wrote. “I have no money in my savings and I am struggling to live check to check.”

The case was dismissed on technical grounds, he says.

In another instance, Nunez got a strange response from a police officer when he was pulled over one day in the Bronx.

“I had a blunt [marijuana] in my hand. They took my ID, ran my name, came back, said, ‘Have a nice day Mr. Nunez’,” he said. “It was like they had seen too much of me.”

In 2015, he did return to Rikers to visit a relative. He says the officers made him walk repeatedly through the metal detector even though it wasn’t alerting.

Hoping to avoid confrontation, he moved to leave. But officers blocked him in and pulled him into a room.

In the room, on one wall, he said, was a sign that cited the Nunez case and urged detainees who claim they had been assaulted by an officer to call a phone number. It was not clear if that was a legal advertisement or tied to the city’s consent decree.

“My case law was on the wall,” Nunez says. “I wanted to file a retaliation case and went to the law firm, and they said it wasn’t a big enough case for them. That hurt my heart.”

Meanwhile, in those wood-paneled rooms downtown, much had been happening. On June 22, 2015, under pressure from the Justice Department, the de Blasio administration signed a consent decree or settlement which created the monitor and forced the city to install 8,000 cameras in the jails.

The deal also provided $3.5 million to be divided among the 11 named plaintiffs. Nunez got $75,000. When he asked why that number, he says he was told, “That’s what the case is worth based on your injuries.”

After attorney fees, Nunez says he received roughly $47,000. He used most of that to pay off debts.

“They screwed me over, though,” Nunez says. “Yes, there were others who had more severe trauma, but I feel I should have gotten more than $75,000 because my case brought their cases together.”

After that, he stopped really following the journey of the high-profile class action. In 2016, his son Zion was born, followed by the twins in 2019. His relationship with their mom ended, though they continue to co-parent, he says.

He decided to move on from Hollywood production companies, and has driven a shuttle bus at Kennedy Airport, a truck for a company that produces youth dance competitions around the country, and helped build advertising installations for a marketing firm.

But he was forced to file for bankruptcy in July 2024, citing thousands of dollars in credit card debt, records show.

“I got myself in a financial hole,” he said. “I purchased a car, and the payments were too much and so I felt the best thing I could do for my credit was file bankruptcy.”

Meanwhile, in the Rikers case, the two sides were haggling over a looming contempt order, which Judge Laura Swain approved last November, finding the city failed to comply with court orders over the eight years of the monitor. The order set the stage for her historic ruling in May that the city can’t run the system by itself — an outside manager was needed as well.

Nunez’s bankruptcy case was resolved in September, the records show. The class action remains very much unresolved, as the recent docket entries show.

Through it all, Nunez finds peace in helping to raise his sons and in his photography hobby. He likes to make his way onto rooftops and photograph the city.

“I call them ‘voyages’ because you never know where you’re going to end up, “ he says.

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With Nicholas Williams


©2025 New York Daily News. Visit at nydailynews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

 

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