New York City courts threw out over half of all criminal summonses issued in 2024, largely due to paperwork errors and legal insufficiencies, a new report released this week shows.
According to a new research brief from John Jay College’s Data Collaborative for Justice, 69 percent of all court summonses in the city were immediately dismissed at a court hearing last year. What’s more, the report also showed that Black and brown communities were disproportionately the subject of defective court summonses.
A record-breaking 20 percent of all city court summonses were defective in 2024, meaning they were rejected prior to arraignment due to a technical issue. In 2023, 16 percent were defective, the previous highest amount in the decade prior…