Lockerbie, Revisited

When Nicole Hudson’s ex-boyfriend allegedly jumped on top of her, punched her and banged on the windows of her car, she feared for her life, according to a statement from her cited in state court records.

As Hudson tried to speed away to escape the violent confrontation at a Brooklyn block party in 2019, she ran over her sister’s girlfriend and dragged her body down the street, paralyzing her, court papers state.

Hudson was charged with attempted murder and assault, and faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted of the most serious charge. Brooklyn prosecutors offered her an alternative to a decadeslong sentence: She could plead guilty to reckless assault and face only five years in prison, followed by five years of post-release supervision.

But there was a catch. By taking the deal, Hudson would have to waive her right to a special hearing where a judge could consider a less severe sentence. Since 2019, a New York law has allowed domestic violence survivors who commit crimes related to their abuse to ask judges for more lenient punishment.

New York’s highest court ruled last month that Hudson’s plea agreement undermined that landmark state law, which intended to prevent domestic violence survivors from receiving excessive sentences. The Court of Appeals said forcing survivors to waive their right to one of these hearings as a condition of a plea deal would “eviscerate” a path to lower sentences for the “vast majority” of domestic violence survivors charged with crimes.

The decision ordered a lower court to reconsider Hudson’s case.

“I know that I caused great harm, and I take full accountability for that. I also know that my actions came from my years of abuse,” Hudson said in a statement. “I am very glad that other survivors will now have the chance to be heard in court about how their histories of abuse have affected their lives and their cases.”

Advocates for domestic violence survivors said the ruling will remove a barrier that has prevented victims across the state from sharing their experiences of abuse with a judge. But prosecutors expressed concern that the ruling would prolong an already painful process for the victims of the crimes the domestic violence survivors commit. They also point out that, like in Hudson’s case, the person a domestic violence survivor harms is not always the person abusing them.

“Basically, it boils down to us having to go back to a victim and letting them know that the sentence that was imposed, that they have come to terms with, is at risk of being reduced,” said Mary Pat Donnelly, President of the District Attorneys Association of the State of New York. “It can be very traumatizing to victims.”

Oren Yaniv, a spokesperson for the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, echoed that sentiment.

“We respect the court’s decision but are concerned it will make it harder to resolve appropriate cases early, even where prosecutors have thoughtfully considered the survivor-defendant’s circumstances,” he said.

Shifting power from prosecutors to judges

The Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act was first proposed in 2011 and took eight years to pass, following a groundswell of support from women’s advocacy groups, domestic violence organizations, attorneys, judges and houses of worship, according to a brief filed by lawmakers. New York was the first state to pass such a law, prompting similar proposals in several other states.

State lawmakers said in their brief to the court that allowing prosecutors to use these hearings as a “plea-bargaining chip” would go against the Legislature’s intent and take away power that they intended to put in the hands of judges.

“ This case is so important, because it gets back to what the New York Legislature was trying to do,” said Ross Kramer, director of the Incarcerated Gender Violence Survivors Initiative at Sanctuary for Families.

State Sen. Roxanne Persaud, who sponsored the legislation, declined to comment while the decision is under review.

The district attorneys association recognizes the need for the law and supports it, Donnelly said. But the new Court of Appeals ruling will complicate how prosecutors navigate what concessions to offer in a plea deal.

“For case law to come down that’s going to basically give a second chance to roll things back after we’ve already done so is frustrating,” she said.

Donnelly, who is the district attorney in upstate New York's Rensselaer County, said prosecutors already take many factors into consideration when offering a plea, including the age of the defendant, their criminal history, their mental health background and any victimization they may have endured. She said prosecutors also consider whether the victim acted as an aggressor in the situation or whether the defendant could argue that their own actions were justified.

“We feel that we are doing everything we can to examine these mitigating circumstances,” she said.

Prosecutors have more “intimate knowledge” of cases than judges, Donnelly said.

“I do think that it makes sense that we have some input when we’re approaching this. But, she said, “we will do what we always do and follow the directives of the law.”

The 'whirlwind' of plea negotiations

Hudson had a young daughter when she was arrested and was desperate to reunite with her while she was still a child, said her attorney, Paris DeYoung. She didn’t want to turn down the prosecution’s offer and risk spending decades behind bars.

“In her mind, that’s not really a choice,” said DeYoung, a supervising attorney in the Legal Aid Society’s criminal appeals bureau.

The Survivors Justice Project has received letters from people like Hudson in jails and prisons across the state, who said they were similarly pressured to give up a Domestic Violence Justice Act hearing in exchange for a plea deal, according to the group's legal and policy director, Kate Mogulescu.

“ It's almost an impossible situation,” said Mogulescu, who is also a professor at Brooklyn Law School.

She said domestic violence survivors often struggle to navigate these plea negotiations in the “chaos” of a criminal prosecution.

“They have just committed harm to a loved one,” she said. “It may have been a loved one that also was abusing them and causing them harm. But still, there's grief, there's guilt, there's loss in that moment.”

Mogulescu said many survivors have never discussed the domestic violence they experienced before that moment. The plea bargaining process can mimic the powerlessness they felt in their relationship, she said.

“ They understand viscerally the overwhelming control and power that prosecutors have,” she said. “In many instances, that is similar to the coercive control they've experienced in their domestic violence relationships.”

Donnelly said she would “hate to think that anyone’s being coerced into taking a plea.” She said prosecutors don’t interact directly with criminal defendants and that she hopes defense attorneys protect their clients from feeling pressured. District attorneys, she said, offer pleas based on the facts, the proof, and the experiences of both the victim and the defendant.

“The goal is, obviously, public safety and rehabilitation,” she said.

But Michele Evans said she felt like she had no other choice when she accepted a plea deal after she hit her then-husband with her car while she tried to flee an argument in the East Village in 2017. He survived, and she was charged with assault.

Unlike Hudson, Evans had a Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act hearing. In her case, she said, she felt pressure from the judge to plead guilty if she wanted to have a hearing.

“I hated making the decision,” she said. “But my lawyer, everything she was telling me [was], ‘You gotta take it, you gotta take it. You could end up with 25 years in prison.’”

After the hearing, a judge sentenced Evans to three years, according to incarceration records. She said she met many women on Rikers Island and in prison who felt pressured to take plea deals because they lacked evidence to prove they had experienced domestic abuse.

“It’s the path of least damage,” she said.

Evans said it was “unconscionable” that prosecutors were trying to prevent people from having the opportunity to argue in court that they were trying to defend themselves when they committed a crime.

“What kind of system would not want an accurate picture?” she said. “What kind of system would want to punish people for surviving?”

It’s a routine, if divisive, feature of the city’s civic calendar every spring: a nine-member board that sets the rent for about 1 million regulated apartments gathers to decide on a range of potential rent increases. A few months later, they’ll hold a final, binding vote.

The Rent Guidelines Board’s preliminary vote will take place Thursday night in Long Island City, but its decision this year is anything but routine. The hearing will instead showcase the seismic changes in New York City’s political landscape and reveal whether the board's new members are willing to fulfill Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s now-famous campaign pledge to “freeze the rent” throughout his first term in office.

Prominent tenant and landlord advocates are calling for two dramatically different, but unprecedented outcomes.

Mamdani has himself stopped publicly touting his former pledge since taking office in the face of legal questions over intervention and undue influence. Although the board is appointed by the mayor, it is supposed to act independently, free from political maneuvering.

But when he was still just a candidate, Mamdani made clear how he felt at the last preliminary vote in April 2025, when he turned a post-hearing press conference into an impromptu campaign rally for his then long-shot bid for the Democratic nomination for mayor.

“When they increase the rent, they push New Yorkers out of their homes,” Mamdani told the crowd outside LaGuardia College that night last year. “We need to be clear that if we are serious about tackling homelessness, if we are serious about tackling the housing crisis then there is only one answer we have to lead with and that is freezing the rent.”

Two months later, the board approved a 3% increase on one-year leases, marking a combined 12% rent hike in four years under Mayor Eric Adams.

Now, most of the members who approved the increase are gone. Mamdani has reshaped the Rent Guidelines Board by naming five new tenant-friendly members and reappointing a sixth.

He has also empowered a new “Office of Mass Engagement” to knock on doors and urge New Yorkers — tenants and landlords alike — to speak at a series of upcoming Rent Guidelines Board hearings before the final vote in June. Mamdani has said the goal is civic engagement and that canvassers will not encourage people to testify for anything in particular.

But the leading landlord lobbying group is skeptical and says Mamdani is masking an illegal attempt to strongarm the board under the guise of participation.

“The Mayor knows the data from his own RGB does not warrant a rent freeze in any way,” New York Apartment Association CEO Kenny Burgos said in a social media post responding to Mamdani’s new effort. “So instead he’s going to use millions of dollars in taxpayer money, while the city is in a budget deficit, to hire scripted doorknockers and pressure campaign his own Rent Guidelines Board.”

The New York Apartment Association represents owners of thousands of rent-stabilized apartments across the city and has urged the board to take a unique approach this year by approving an increase for apartments in buildings constructed before 1974. Those buildings typically have lower rents and higher rates of financial distress than newer buildings subject to rent-stabilization because of government regulatory agreements.

The board has on two previous occasions under Mayor Michael Bloomberg voted for different increases based on how long a tenant has held a lease. The board has never voted for a split increase based on the age of the building itself. The board voted for a freeze on three occasions, all under Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Supporters of a rent increase, including many economists, point to rising insurance, fuel and maintenance costs for property owners described in recent board expense data.

“The RGB needs to protect the long-term health of these buildings because the government doesn’t have the cash, capacity or capability to meet the current scale of distress,” Burgos said in a written statement.

Net operating income — the amount of money left over for landlords after expenses, but before mortgage payments — rose by more than 6% in buildings with rent-stabilized units citywide, according to a report prepared by Rent Guidelines Board staff. But landlord groups say that was mostly driven by a spike in “Core Manhattan” below West 110th and East 96th streets and belies serious financial problems in places like the Bronx, where income actually ticked down slightly.

Tenant groups counter that people in rent-stabilized buildings are also lower-income than the city as a whole, and that people living in the buildings that have the lowest margins also tend to be the New Yorkers who are least able to shoulder a rent increase.

Rent Guidelines Board data shows more than half of New York City renters spend at least 30% of their income on housing — a threshold deemed “rent-burdened” by the federal government. Unemployment and cash assistance cases for extremely low-income New Yorkers also rose last year, according to the board’s reporting.

Organizations like NYS Tenant Bloc have also urged the board to think differently, by approving a first-of-its-kind rent freeze for two-year leases.

“Rent is the highest bill we pay every month and every time it goes up, more New Yorkers risk losing their homes,” said NYS Tenant Bloc Director Sumathy Kumar in a statement. “A rent freeze is the common-sense first step to overcoming NYC’s housing crisis.”

Gov. Kathy Hochul and state lawmakers are poised to crack down on New York City drivers who repeatedly trigger the city’s speed cameras, requiring them to install and pay for a speed-limiting device in their vehicle.

Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie told Gothamist on Wednesday that he anticipates the so-called “super speeder” measure will be included in a final state budget agreement, which is now five weeks late.

Heastie, a Democrat from the Bronx, said Assembly Democrats will support a version of the legislation that requires the owner of any vehicle that racks up 16 or more speed-camera tickets in 12 months to install an Intelligent Speed Assistance device, which uses GPS technology to limit a vehicle’s speed based on the local speed limit.

The speaker’s comments came after a closed-door meeting of the state Assembly’s Democratic members from New York City, where they discussed the issue.

Hochul and the state Senate’s Democratic majority previously pledged support for iterations of the measure; their staffers were scheduled to meet Wednesday night to iron out the final details.

“We had  a conference with the city members,” Heastie told Gothamist. “And I think for the most part, they're comfortable in moving forward — with some major differences from the governor's [proposal].”

A bill cracking down on the most notorious speeders has been kicking around the state Legislature since 2023.

It received a major boost in January, when Hochul included a version of the proposal in her state budget plan.

Senate Democrats followed suit in March, including a different version in their own state budget proposal.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has backed the measure.

Hochul’s proposal, however, didn’t lay out many details. Instead, it would have let New York City determine how many tickets triggered the speed-limiting device requirement.

Heastie said the measure is expected to end up looking more like the existing legislative proposal, which Brooklyn-based Democrats Sen. Andrew Gounardes and Assemblymember Emily Gallagher sponsored.

“There’s been a lot of positive momentum on this issue in recent days and while we still have more details to iron out, I feel fairly optimistic that we’ll get to a final agreement to enact a super speeder program for NYC,” Gounardes said in a statement.

The Assembly’s decision marks a major win for families of vehicle-crash victims, who banded together to form a group known as Families for Safe Streets New York. The group was a frequent presence at the Capitol in recent weeks and met with Hochul on Monday.

In a joint statement, the co-chairs of the group’s executive committee said the super speeders bill is “critical” and “will save lives.”

“We’re fighting to ensure it’s in the final budget,” Kate Brockwehl and Fabiola Mendietta said in the statement. “We’re cautiously optimistic and eager to see the full details."

Heastie and some Assembly Democrats had previously raised concerns about due process with the super speeder bill.

But he said the Assembly is on board with a version that addresses those concerns by removing a proposed misdemeanor charge for a driver who doesn’t install the speed-limiting device. Instead, the owner of the vehicle will face a series of escalating civil fines leading up to revoking the vehicle’s registration.

“ We’re talking about a civil violation,” Heastie said. “To add a criminal penalty on a civil violation, the city members … had a little bit of an issue on that. So that’s not going to happen.”

Heastie said the owner of the vehicle will be required to pay for the speed-limiting device. It costs approximately $150 to install and requires a $4-a-day subscription, according to the SteerSafe Partnership, a coalition that includes the largest manufacturers of the device and lobbied in favor of the super-speeder bill.

Drivers who can’t afford the cost will be allowed to enroll in a payment plan, Heastie said.