Direct link (PDF) to the class action complaint filed with the federal Southern District Court of New York.
This is certainly a different avenue than I expected for vindicating the rights of NYC cyclists, but is very welcome. Conventionally, when a law is enforced improperly, the matter is adjudicated and that settles the matter for the person in question. However, that does not necessarily set "legal precedence", which is the obligation for other courts and judges to rule in the same way.
To establish that a law is indeed being wrongly applied, someone would have to either appeal their case to the appellate court -- whose ruling would then set precedence for all the lower courts to follow -- or they file suit for "declaratory judgement", where a court is asked specifically to rule on the validity of some law, regulation, or contract. And that in-depth analysis would set precedence, because it specifically litigates the core legality of what's in question.
Declaratory judgement is what I thought would happen, but here, they've taken a different approach. Because the plaintiff posits that the law is clearly on their side -- with zero room for any other interpretation, bolstered by the fact that a judge dismissed the charge against the cyclist earlier -- they argue NYPD is operating unconstitutionally, violating whole swaths of people's rights.
After all, the issue isn't that some law conflicts with other laws, but that NYPD is systemically misapplying the wrong law against people conducting themselves lawfully. That's akin to constantly prosecuting pedestrians for a failure to use low-beams at night. So absurd it is, the plaintiffs claim, that it amounts to unconstitutional harassment.
Hence, they bring a class action claim to vindicate the constitutional right to not be falsely arrested (4th Amendment, NY Constitution, and common law), and the right to be free from malicious prosecution. Note that it's common to use a "scattergun" approach for lawsuits, in the hope that any one of these will stick.
With all that said, this is a bigger lift than "declaratory judgement" would have been, but unlike that process, this class action allows prior victims of NYPD's false arrests to recover some money from the city, if they join the class action. As with all class action suits, the defendant will challenge the class definition, likely arguing that not every class member suffered equal harm.
And that's possibly true: being dragged to court for an improper traffic citation affects people differently, whether they have to arrange child care for the day or whether they had to hire a lawyer or not. But the response to that would be: the harm suffered by the class was the constitutional rights that were trampled on. And it is very well settled that wrongly abridged constitutional rights, if for even a brief moment, is a cognizable harm that can be redressed in court.
