By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma
When officials at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility found out our client, Yekatrina Pusepa, was in an illicit relationship with a prison guard they did nothing to protect her. Instead, they held her out as bait. And when she would not cooperate with them, they threw her in solitary confinement based on trumped up charges. While in solitary, she was left alone with a notoriously violent inmate who had threatened her before — and was able to brutally attack her because of official indifference. Those are the charges in a new lawsuit brought by the ZMO Law PLLC and Perlmutter & McGuinness, P.C. in federal court in Manhattan.
The suit is one of at least three pending suits against the New York prison system based on what is alleged to be routine abuse and inadequate protection of women prisoners. In Pusepa’s case, the lawsuit alleges that prison officials bungled their investigation, which ultimately led to minor criminal charges lodged against her assailant, former C.O. Ruben Illa, by re-victimizing Ms. Pusepa at every turn. An official told Pusepa that the prison was aware that she was in a relationship with Illa. Under New York law, inmates are not legally capable of consenting to sexual contact with corrections officers, and therefore all sexual contact between inmates and officers is considered non-consensual. Such contact therefore violates the Eighth Amendment. But, according to the suit, the prison continued to allow Illa to work with Pusepa, even letting him swap shifts with another guard so that he could spend more time with her.
The other lawsuit, also brought by the Margulis-Ohnuma and Perlmutter & McGuinness firms, attempts to hold prison officials responsible for forcible sexual abuse by another guard at Bedford Hills, who was prosecuted for forcibly touching our client.
The third suit, brought by the Legal Aid Society and the white-shoe law firm Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, documents the pervasive patterns of abuse in the New York prisons and seeks injunctive relief to force the corrections department to take more serious steps to put an end to it.