Two NYPD Officers Lied In Court About Their Arrest Of A Black Lives Matter Protester. The Manhattan D.A. Cleared Them.

A Black Lives Matter protester won a judgment this week against New York City in a lawsuit over two police officers who lied in official paperwork and on the witness stand after her arrest during a 2016 march in Manhattan.

Ironically, the judgement, which will cost the city more than $52,000, arises out of a now-discontinued NYPD scheme to reduce the amount of money the city pays out to protesters who sue over false arrests – not by reducing the number of false arrests, but by coercing protesters into signing away their rights to sue.

The lawsuit, brought by Cristina Winsor, a 43-year-old artist and activist, alleged that her arrest and prosecution was part of a larger “pattern and practice” on the part of the NYPD that deprives protesters of their constitutional rights.

Under an unusual arrangement with Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., Black Lives Matter protesters charged with minor offenses between 2016 and 2018 were prosecuted not by the lawyers from the DA’s office, but by the police department’s own in-house lawyers, empowered by Vance to act as prosecutors. NYPD leadership explained to the Daily News in early 2016 that “too many cases involving people they consider professional protesters are dismissed in summons court, paving the way for a civil lawsuit and settlement with the city.”

By putting the NYPD’s own lawyers in summons court acting as prosecutors, the police department would be able to tell protesters that their charges would only be resolved if they signed papers declaring that they were properly arrested, thus preventing them from suing over improper arrests.

Faced with the choice of taking this deal or committing to a potentially expensive and time-consuming trial over a minor violation, most protesters took the deal. Winsor did not.

“It just felt wrong,” Winsor told Gothamist. “I was being falsely accused of something I hadn’t done, and I was being prosecuted by the police, the same people who had falsely arrested me. It seemed like a conflict of interest, like we were going down the slope to a police state.”

Winsor says she’s glad of the judgment in her favor, but she worries that there remains little accountability for police who lie. There’s no evidence that the police who swore to untrue accounts in her arrest paperwork and again on the stand at her trial were ever disciplined by the NYPD, and the Manhattan DA’s office says it has cleared them of perjury.

On the evening of July 11th, 2016, Winsor joined a Black Lives Matter protest. Marching with the demonstration along the sidewalk on 116th Street, Winsor saw a senior police officer, identifiable by his white shirt, arresting a friend of hers, Babbie Dunnington, on the edge of the street.

“I saw that she looked scared,” Winsor would later testify at her trial, “and I wanted to see what the police were doing with my friend.” Winsor stepped off the sidewalk and followed the police as they brought the other protester in handcuffs to a waiting van, but within 15 seconds found herself grabbed from behind and put in handcuffs as well. Winsor was arrested, taken to a nearby precinct for processing, and released several hours later with summonses to appear in court on charges of disorderly conduct and walking in the roadway.

Under ordinary circumstances, Winsor would have appeared in summons court on her charges, and walked away with an adjournment in contemplation of dismissal, or ACD – an agreement that if she stayed out of trouble for the next six months, the charges against her would be dismissed and sealed. The Manhattan DA’s office was not in the habit of devoting prosecutorial resources to throwing the book at people charged with minor offenses like jaywalking in summons court.

But because of the new understanding between the District Attorney and the NYPD, when Winsor showed up for her court appearance, she was met by a police lawyer, acting as a prosecutor, who informed her that the only way she was getting out of the courtroom with an ACD was if she signed papers agreeing that an untrue police version of the circumstances of her arrest was in fact true. If she signed the papers, she wouldn’t have any way to hold the police to account for their lies about her arrest. If she didn’t, she would have to face the expense in time and money of a full trial on charges that people arrested outside of the context of a protest, who didn’t incur the special attention of the NYPD’s legal team, saw dismissed as a matter of course. Winsor chose the latter option, and went to trial.

At Winsor’s trial in September of 2017, her arresting officer, Regina Vasquez, doubled down on the version of events in her memo book and arrest paperwork. Vasquez testified that over the course of more than three minutes, Winsor had shoved her five to ten times in a concerted effort to interfere with Dunnington’s arrest by Officer Christopher Mulvey, despite Vasquez’s repeated instructions to return to the sidewalk, which was unobstructed.

Officer Mulvey testified as well: No one else was responsible for Dunnington’s arrest, he said. There weren’t even any white-shirted officers in the vicinity when he made the arrest. There were no obstacles preventing protesters from immediately getting on the sidewalk, he said. He testified that Winsor had interfered with the arrest, yelling at him and grabbing Dunnington, and that his partner, Officer Vasquez, had directed Winsor to get back on the sidewalk at least five times before she finally arrested her.

Unfortunately for the officers, and unbeknownst to them at the time of their testimony, there was video evidence that showed the sequence of events they were describing under oath, and it contradicted critical aspects of their account. The video shows the sidewalk separated from 116th Street by a line of scaffolding supports, shows not Mulvey but a white-shirted senior officer arresting Dunnington, shows the police and not the protesters blocking vehicular traffic, and shows that in the brief seconds between when Winsor stepped off the sidewalk and when she was arrested, she never shoved Vasquez or interfered in Dunnington’s arrest.

After the video played in court, the judge presiding in the case, Stephen Antignani, was upset, going on at length at the evidently false testimony of the police witnesses.

“Didn’t the witnesses in fact say that there was no scaffolding on this street and then the video show there was?” he asked. “Didn’t the second witness say that he actually made the arrest of Ms. Dunnington, was the only one to stop her and there was no white shirt around, when in fact the video says differently? Isn’t it true that the witness said that he was the one who went up to speak to her, no one else, when the video shows that was not true?”

“Your officers gave me a version of events in which they described in great detail certain aspects of this whole incident,” the judge told Neil Fenton, the police lawyer acting as prosecutor, after the video was shown in court. But the uncontroverted video evidence, he said, “is totally different from what your officers, who on first blush came across quite credibly, what they told me happened.”

“Your witness under oath came into this courtroom and told me that he was the one who approached Ms. Dunnington. He was the one who told her to get back on the sidewalk. He was the one who first started to put her in handcuffs. He was the one who did that,” Antignani told Felton. “I would focus, because you don’t have a lot of time, on the credibility issues of your witnesses, having seen that video and knowing what your witnesses testified to under oath in front of me.”


Fenton tried to suggest to the judge that perhaps all of these discredited statements might have been the innocent result of a failure of memory.

“Then they say I don’t remember,” Antignani retorted. “That’s not what they did. They said they remembered explicitly.”

The prosecution’s case depended on the officers’ testimony, Antignani told Fenton. “As someone who was a prosecutor for over twenty years, it disheartens me to ask you: If I can only base this conviction on the words of those officers, how do I do that beyond a reasonable doubt?”

Antignani acquitted Winsor of all charges on October 2nd, 2017.

The evident perjury by officers of the law, and the judge’s clear dismay at its appearance in his courtroom, garnered press attention at the time. Appearing on a NYC Bar Association panel on police testimony a week later, NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Legal Matters Larry Byrne was asked about the case, and said publicly that the police department was conducting an internal investigation, and had also asked the Manhattan District Attorney to investigate.

The ongoing media attention, and growing questions about the propriety of outsourcing the pursuit of justice to lawyers with a clear conflict of interest, culminated in a scorching letter to DA Cyrus Vance from state legislators in March of 2018, calling his arrangement with the police a violation of state law and “an untenable abdication of duty.”

Days after the letter was made public, Vance announced the end of the policy. Asked about the retraction of the agreement by the Daily News, Byrne, the head of the NYPD’s Legal Bureau, spun the development as a considered shift in NYPD strategy. “I don't have the resources and time to do these cases anymore,” he said. “If we do them we have the trial. We have to do the appeals. We decided to use the resources in a different way."

Winsor sued Mulvey and Vasquez in federal court over her false arrest and malicious prosecution, and sued the City of New York for the NYPD’s prosecution of her case when it should have known better. That’s the lawsuit that ended in the $52,501 judgement against the officers and the city this week. But there’s no provision in the law to allow a civil suit over false testimony, so Winsor can’t sue the officers for lying on the stand at her trial. Accountability for police lying on the stand would have to come either from NYPD discipline or a prosecution by the Manhattan District Attorney.

Despite Byrne’s statement that the NYPD was investigating the false testimony of the officers in Winsor’s case, there’s no evidence that the officers were ever disciplined, or indeed that any thorough police investigation ever took place. Key witnesses like Winsor and Dunnington, whose testimony would necessarily be a key element to any investigation, told Gothamist they have never been contacted by NYPD investigators.

The problem of accountability for officers’ false testimony is a longstanding concern for NYPD watchdogs. Annual reports from the Citizens Commission to Combat Police Corruption repeatedly observe that the department tends to avoid charging officers accused of making false statements under the strictest rule, which would warrant their firing. The most recently available report, from 2019, shows that of the 144 officers facing departmental allegations related to false statements, only nine of them were charged under the strictest rule. The rest were presented with more flexible and lenient charges, or weren’t charged for their false statements at all.

Some of those more lenient charges may have been appropriate, the Commission observed, as the officer may not have actually intended to lie. However, “in other cases, false statement charges appeared provable but were not brought.”

The 2019 Independent Panel on NYPD Discipline summed up the problem this way: “Numerous stakeholders have expressed concerns about lax enforcement and practices that enable bad actors to escape accountability and avoid the presumptive termination penalty.”

When Gothamist asked whether the investigation Byrne had said was in process ever took place, the NYPD declined to answer. Whatever may have happened with that investigation, Mulvey and Vasquez remain on the force, both currently assigned to the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group, a unit frequently deployed during demonstrations.

Vance’s office told Gothamist that it did investigate the officers, but concluded that, the discrepancies between their testimony and the video evidence notwithstanding, “the officers did not commit the crime of perjury.”

Listen to Nick Pinto his reporting on WNYC:

Just how thorough Vance’s investigation was remains unclear, however. Winsor and Dunnington were never contacted by the prosecutor’s office either. Asked whether the investigators had interviewed anyone other than police officers before reaching its conclusion, a spokesperson for the DA’s office declined to answer.

As of early February of 2018, the court reporter for the criminal trial had yet to produce a transcript, according to correspondence with Winsor’s lawyer. According to the DA’s spokesperson, the investigation into the officers’ testimony began in October of 2017 and concluded on March 30th of 2018, and included a review of the criminal trial transcript.

If the DA’s investigation did review the transcript in those final weeks of its investigation, that almost makes their exoneration of the officers worse, says Gideon Oliver, Winsor’s lawyer.

“It shows that even when you have cops whose testimony totally conflicts with the reality of what happened, as depicted on video, in significant and material ways, prosecutors have near boundless willingness to cover for and excuse this kind of behavior on the part of cops, which they would never tolerate from anyone else,” Oliver said.

The DA’s office disputed this characterization, providing Gothamist with a list of 30 NYPD officers the office has brought charges against in the last 12 years, including four charged with perjury and 10 others with other charges related to lying about arrests or summonses. “Our office routinely and aggressively prosecutes these cases,” a spokesperson wrote to Gothamist.

Last year when Gothamist published the DA’s internal list of NYPD officers whose testimony judges had found not credible, Mulvey and Vasquez weren’t on it. Asked why they weren’t included, the DA’s office responded with a statement: “The ‘recently assembled record’ that was produced to Gothamist is not and has never been the sole means that the office uses to document or disclose such instances” of courts finding police testimony not to be credible.

When Winsor sued over her treatment, she empowered the lawyers for New York City to review her sealed case file and any material the DA might have relevant to her lawsuit, including any investigation into the officers’ testimony. Under the court’s rules of procedure, the City’s lawyers were required in February of this year to turn over any evidence they had retrieved from the case file or the District Attorney’s office. When they did so, their disclosure didn’t include anything from any investigation. The DA’s office told Gothamist they never received any request from City lawyers.

Oliver, who has also worked on open records requests on behalf of Gothamist/WNYC, said the District Attorney owes the public a greater degree of transparency.

“Especially in a case like this, where there’s such a stark contrast between the video and the investigation’s conclusion, they should release the records related to that investigation,” Oliver said. “Because in my opinion, it must have been a sham.”

Jennvine Wong, who heads the Legal Aid Society of New York’s Cop Accountability Project, says that while comprehensive data on the problem of false police testimony is hard to come by, anecdotal accounts suggest that it’s hardly uncommon.

“From media reports and the stories that circulate among defense attorneys, we know that the NYPD is woefully inefficient at policing their own when it comes to false testimony, and that DA’s offices have strong disincentives from pursuing these cases,” Wong said. “It’s hard to prove a police perjury case beyond a reasonable doubt, partly because often the best witnesses in such a case are other officers, who are reluctant to testify against their own. Prosecutors also rely on the cooperation and goodwill of police to make their cases; if they alienate the police, their prosecutions get more difficult.”

Assemblymember Dan Quart, who organized the 2018 letter from legislators urging Vance to stop letting police act as prosecutors, and who is now running to replace Vance as Manhattan DA, said the episode speaks to a pattern in the current District Attorney’s tenure.

“Whatever the NYPD asks of Cy Vance, he's more than willing to accommodate them, including turning over an essential function of his office to them,” Quart said.

Vance’s office, which has clashed with the NYPD over some policy issues in recent years, rejected Quart’s characterization.

Lawyers for New York City agreed to pay Winsor $20,000 as well as legal fees as part of the judgment against the City, but did not admit any liability. Oliver said civil rights suits can only do so much in effecting change.

“What a lawsuit like this one can do is shine some light on what’s happening,” Oliver said. “In a functioning democratic city government, the next step should be that elected officials or other people with power over the police see what’s happening and step in. Unfortunately, there’s been no meaningful oversight from those people in New York City. This judgment isn’t justice, and it’s not accountability. Those things would have to come from the DA, or the mayor, or the City Council. We haven’t seen it from them yet.”